Attitudes toward Death among Health Care Professionals in the Balkan Region
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background and Objectives: Death is an unavoidable experience in any person’s life and affects not only the dying person but also their caregivers. The dying process has been displaced from homes to health care facilities in the majority of cases. Facing death and dying has become an everyday life of health care professionals (HCP), especially in palliative care (PC) settings. This study aimed to investigate the death attitudes among HCPs in Serbia. Materials and Methods: The Serbian version of the Death Attitude Profile-Revised (DAP-RSp) was used as a measurement instrument. Results: The average age of the 180 included participants was 42.2 ± 9.9 years; the majority were females (70.0%), with more than 10 years of working experience (73.0%), physicians (70.0%) and those working in a non-oncological (non-ONC) field (57.78%). The mean total score of DAP-RSp was 124.80 ± 22.44. The highest mean score was observed in the neutral acceptance dimension (NA) (5.82 ± 0.90) and lowest in the Escape acceptance (EA) (2.57 ± 1.21). Higher negative death attitudes were reported among nurses compared to physicians (p = 0.002). Statistically significant differences were observed in the fear of death (FD) and death avoidance (DA) domains, favoring PC specialists and oncologists (p = 0.004; p = 0.015). Physicians working in Oncology (ONC) showed lower FD values (p = 0.001) compared to non-ONC departments. Conclusions: Attitudes toward death among HCPs are of great importance for the well-being of both HCPs and patients. Negative attitudes can lead to deficient care. The fear of death is highly represented among Serbian HCPs working in non-ONC fields, including both nurses and physicians. This study emphasizes the need for further research to comprehensively explore and understand HCPs’ attitudes toward death. This research highlights the need for the development of an educational curriculum across all levels of medical education, aimed at overcoming the fear of death and enhancing coping strategies, which will improve the care for patients diagnosed with terminal illnesses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".