Effect of spirituality levels of relatives of patients on attitude towards death in palliative care

At the beginning of modern medicine; Despite of improvements in antibiotics, organ transplants, blood transfusions, surgical interventions, and curative treatments for a large number of cancer patients; medical interventions looked at body and disease with a technical approach. However, today, besides organ care, sole health paradigm approach that cares about existential or spiritual care has begun to be adopted. Palliative care developed for this purpose; provides psychological, emotional, social and spiritual support, besides medical care, pain management services and treatments, to patients in age spectrum who have severely debilitating conditions or terminal diagnoses. It is known that a fatal disease and its accompanying pain and symptoms undermine basis of existence of patient and patient's relatives. For this reason, it was aimed to determine effect of level of spirituality on attitude towards death by examining differences of caregivers of patients about the concepts of spirituality and death they face in palliative care treatment process according to demographic information. Within the scope of research, a literature review and a questionnaire were conducted on subject, 160 people from relatives of inpatients at Erzurum Regional Training and Research Hospital Palliative Care Service, were applied Attitude Against Death Scale and Spirituality Scale along with socio-demographic form for collecting data and data were collected through face-to-face interviews and analyzed with SPSS 25 analysis program. Statistically, t-test, one-way variance analysis and correlation test were used. It was concluded that spirituality levels of relatives of patients were effective on their attitudes towards death.