Nursing attitudes in end-of-life care described by the FATCOD scale: a review of the literature
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56294/nds2025152Keywords:
attitude, palliative care, end-of-life care, knowledge, FATCOD scaleAbstract
Introduction: Attitudes "allows behavioral tendencies to be mobilized through cognitive, emotional and rational components" (Espinoza et al., 2016), being necessary within the development of nursing skills in palliative care, to know the attitudes towards the care of terminally ill people and of their families; worldwide there are several scales, one of them, the Frommelt Attitude Toward Care of the Dying (FADCO) scale, which measures nursing attitudes
towards the care of dying patients and their families, which has been validated and used in different countries and languages.
Objective: This study aims to identify nursing attitudes in end-of-life care described by the FATCOD scale.
Method: A review of the literature was carried out, of scientific articles related to research on the FADCO scale, including articles with full text in Spanish, English and Portuguese, published between 1990 and 2022, including quantitative research, case and control studies, clinical trials, cohort studies and cross-sectional studies; A search was carried out in different databases such as virtual health library, OVID Medicine and Nursing, Proquest Family Health Database, Proquest Health & Medical Collection, Proquest Nursing & Allied Health Database, Proquest Public Health Database, among others.
Results: The search for articles was carried out by means of 26 combinations of keywords to give search formulas, the total sample consisted of 40 articles included in the narrative review, finding that 20% of the countries where the scale was most used was Turkey and China, another important aspect that was evidenced is that according to the culture and beliefs the instrument presented diversity of dimensions and linguistic adaptation according to the country; Regarding the population that was applied, it is distributed among nursing students and professionals with an average age of 36 years, 92% were women, 95.5% of the nurses practice some religion while 87.5% of the students do not report or do not practice. A religion. The respondents have from 1 to 6 years of experience, the students report that only 9.1% have had contact with death, compared to what was found in the professionals that 65% of these had training and contact with death experiences, in In relation to the scale score for professionals it was 88 points and for students 84 points, which indicates that the attitudes of this group are in a
medium range and can be an alert for the academy to strengthen skills in palliative care. necessary for the care of the patient and his family.
Conclusion: It is important to highlight that there are scales or measurement instruments to know the state of preparation and level of competencies that are available to provide quality care. In this narrative review, it was documented that the FATCOD scale has been used in multiple countries with this purpose, highlighting that attitudes modify behavior trends according to their thinking and react in a context protecting their values and beliefs, which translates into attitudes that the professional has to handle a critical situation as it is in different contexts according to their professional profile.
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