Investigation of thanatophobia of intensive care nurses

Intensive care units are areas where human life is at the limit and patients who require intensive care and care by a professional team are accepted. Nurses working in intensive care units face more deaths than nurses working in other units. Thanatophobia, which expresses the state of constantly and permanently experiencing death anxiety and fear, means the fear of death in short. The aim of the study was to examine the Tanatophobia levels of intensive care nurses. The research was cross-sectional and descriptive. Its universe consisted of 150 nurses working in all intensive care units of a medical school hospital. The study was completed with 111 nurses who agreed to participate, except those on leave. Data were collected with the information form prepared by the researcher and the Thanatophobia Scale. For the distribution and mean values in the analysis of the research data; Shapiro-Wilk test, Mann-Whitney U test and Krusskal-Wallis test were used. As a result; the mean score of the nurses' Thanatophobia scale was found to be 29.44±9.13. Intensive care nurses experienced intense fear of death; female (31.3±7.9), associate degree graduate (33.8±9.2), dissatisfied with their profession (31.8±10.3), did not choose their own unit (31.2±9.2) It was concluded that nurses who witnessed death and were affected by this situation (37±7.2) and who wanted training on death anxiety (31.2±10) felt this fear more (p<0.05).