الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Critical care death represents the majority of hospital’s deaths, with more than half a million death each year. Critical care nurses are well positioned to help patients and families during this difficult transition period. ”Being with” patients and families in addition to ”doing things” to them enables critical care nurses to provide the holistic care that is central to nursing.
To provide quality care at the end of life, nurses must not only possess the knowledge and skills to provide this care, but must also develop the attitudes and interpersonal competence to provide compassionate care, therefore caring behaviors of nurses could affect the quality of care. Caring for dying patients is most stressful to nurses who must constantly attend patients, whereas other providers can visit and then walk away. It is important to acknowledge one’s own attitudes toward death and dying in order to better understand patients’ needs at the end of life. Once nurses understand their own attitudes about death and dying, they can work to improve the way they handle situations. The aim of this study was to determine critical care nurses’ attitudes and practices toward care for dying patients.
The study was conducted in the critical care units of Alexandria Main University Hospital (University Hospital) namely the Casualty ICU unit I (12 beds), General ICU unit III (15 beds), Triage intensive care unit (8 beds) and Gamal Abdel Naser insurance hospital namely General ICU of Gamal Abdel Naser insurance hospital which contains 8 beds.
A convenience sample of 100 critical care nurses who are involved in providing direct care for critically ill patient in the previous settings were included in the study. Nurses were distributed as follows: 49 nurses from unit I, 20 nurses from unit III, 26 nurses from triage, and 5 nurses from ICU of Gamal Abd-Elnaser insurance hospital.
Two tools were used by the researcher to collect data of this study. The first tool is “Critical Care Nurses’ attitudes toward dying patients’ Structured Interview”. This tool was developed by Frommelt (15), modified and translated in to Arabic by the researcher. It was used to assess attitudes of critical care nurses toward dying patient. It includes statements that reflect nurses ’feelings and reactions while caring for dying patients as giving nursing care to the dying persons is a worthwhile learning experience, dying patients should be given nursing care such as bathing and turning, dying patients should be given honest answers about their conditions, nurses should permit dying patients to have flexible visiting schedules and the family should be involved in the physical care of the dying patients.