Personal and Emotional Factors of Nursing Professionals Related to Coping with End-of-Life Care: A Cross-Sectional Study

The death of a patient can be a traumatic event, causing emotional and psychological distress in professional nurses and potentially hampering the quality of their care. Optimal self-perceived coping with death involves valuing these difficult situations as challenges and actively coping with work-related stress during the care of the dying patient. Thus, the aim of this study was to assess Spanish nurses’ self-perceived competence with patient death and investigate its relationship with their personality traits, anxiety and fear of death. A cross-sectional study based on a web-based survey was conducted. A sample of 534 Spanish nurses provided socio-demographic information and answered validated questionnaires. Most participants perceived their coping with death as optimal. Men and nurses older than 31 years coped better with death. Professionals with an optimal self-perception showed significantly lower scores on all personality dimensions evaluated, while a higher level of the anxiety trait predicted worse coping. Although with medium explanatory power, psychoticism, anxiety, and fear of death were the main predictors of the development of optimal coping with death among Spanish nurses. These characteristics together with information from the work environment and evidence-based practice could help to develop better routines and contexts of care for nurses working in end-of-life care.