The Impact of Nursing Hospital Workers’ Hospice·Palliative Care Knowledge and Awareness, End-of-Life Care Attitude and Death Awareness on Their End-of-Life Care Performance

Abstract

Purpose: This descriptive study is aimed at identifying how nursing hospital workers’ performance of end-of-life care is influenced by their knowledge and awareness of hospice palliative care, attitude towards end-of-life care, performance, importance, awareness of death and the factors. Methods: A self-reported questionnaire was used to collect data from 113 workers at an accredited nursing hospital in K province. Variables were their knowledge and awareness of hospice palliative care, attitude towards end-of-life care, endof-life care performance and importance and awareness of death. An analysis was performed with the frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, t-test, ANOVA, Scheffe’s test, Pearson’s correlation coefficient and multiple regression using IBM SPSS 21.0. Results: The factors affecting the nursing hospital workers’ end-of-life care performance were the importance of end-of-life care and their marital status, which showed an explanatory power of 38.2%. Conclusion: In order to improve the nursing hospital workers’ end-oflife care performance, a training on the importance of end-of-life care should be provided. Therefore, we would like to propose establishing administrative measures such as 1) efficient staffing to help the caregivers better perform what they think is important, 2) development of a training program that can improve their performance of end-of-life nursing care and 3) a study to verify the effectiveness of the program.