Determining the relationship between the death awareness levels of the nurses working in risky units and their attitudes to the terminally patient

The research was conduct in a descriptively in order to determine the relationship between the awareness levels of the nurses working in risky units and their attitudes towards approaching the terminally patient. The population of the research is Çankırı State Hospital, nurses working in risky units at Çankırı Private Karatekin Hospital (N: 278); The sample consisted of nurses who met the inclusion criteria (n:190). The data were collected using the Personal Information Form, The Multidimensional Death Awareness Scale (TMDAS) and the Attitude Scale for Approaching the Death and the Terminally Patient (ASADTP). Data were evaluated with number, percentage, Kruskal Wallis test, Mann-Whitney U, regression and correlation analysis tests. In the study, ıt has determined that the age, gender, marital status, educational status, choice of profession voluntarily, total working time in the profession, the clinic where they work, the total working time in the clinic, their satisfaction with the clinic, their ability to prevent other patients from being affected in the event of death in the unit, the presence of a health problem, the frequency of thinking about death, the frequency of encountering death in the unit where they work, and finding sufficient in-service training on death are found to be sufficient to affect the scores of ASADTP and TMDAS. It has been determined that the relations between the ASADTP and TMDAS scores are important in the correlation analysis, the awareness of death decreases as the avoidant attitudes increase in the approaches towards the terminally patient and their relatives, and as the self-sufficiency perception increases, the acceptance of death increases (p<0.05). In conclusion, this study shows that nurses' death awareness levels are an important factor in determining their approach to the terminally patient. In this respect, priority should be given to training and development practices aimed at creating nurses' awareness of death and developing positive attitudes towards death and terminally patients. Keywords: Death, Death Awareness, Terminally Patient.