Factors affecting attitudes towards caring for terminally ill patients among nursing students in Switzerland: a cross-sectional study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Positive attitudes towards end-of-life care are essential among nursing students to adequately support terminally ill patients and enable students to feel confident about providing end-of-life care. This study aimed to determine nursing students' attitudes towards caring for terminally ill patients, as well as the associations between these attitudes and year of study, exposure to terminally ill people, self-perceived nursing skills and subjective impact of instruction. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. SETTING: A health sciences school in Switzerland. PARTICIPANTS: All preparatory students, first-year nursing students and third-year nursing students were invited to participate; 178 agreed to participate. PRIMARY OUTCOME MEASURE: Attitudes towards terminally ill patients were assessed using the Frommelt Attitudes Toward Care of the Dying Scale, Form B (FATCOD, Form B), as the primary outcome. Secondary measures were gender, age, year of study, number of terminally ill persons encountered, self-perceived palliative care nursing skills and subjective impact of instruction. RESULTS: Mean FATCOD, Form B score was 117.7 (SD: 9.8, median: 118.0). Better attitudes towards terminally ill patients were significantly associated with being aged 24-26 years (β=6.97, 95% CI 2.00 to 11.95, p=0.006), year of study (β=3.47, 95% CI 1.69 to 5.25, p<0.001), professional encounters with terminally ill patients (β=3.59, 95% CI 2.23 to 4.95, p<0.001) and self-perceived palliative care nursing competence (β=1.23, 95% CI 0.41 to 2.04; p=0.003). In the multivariate analysis, professionally encountering terminally ill patients remained significant (β=3.00; 95% CI 1.43 to 4.57; p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Nursing students' attitudes towards caring for terminally ill patients were positive and improved as their year of study progressed. Professional exposure to terminally ill patients was the strongest factor, followed by private encounters, self-perceived palliative care nursing skills, year of study and age.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".