[Attitude of the medical personnel of a pediatrics department towards patient death].

Introduction: Tertiary care hospitals' physicians require high emotional competence, since they are faced with the demands of terminally ill patients and their families.

Objective: to assess the attitude of physicians of a pediatrics department towards patient death.

Method: Pediatrics staff and resident physicians anonymously answered the Attitudes Towards Death (ATD) questionnaire. Absolute frequencies, percentages, means, standard deviations, Student's t-test and the chi-square test were used. Statistical significance was considered with p < 0.05.

Results: The questionnaire was answered by 38 physicians, 26 (68.4%) were residents and 12 (37.6%) staff physicians; 15 (39.4%) were males and 23 (60.6%) females. Four residents (15.4%) had a positive attitude versus 2 staff physicians (16.7%) (p = 0.920). Statistical significance was found in items 1 (69.2% of residents versus 100% of staff physicians, p = 0.03), 16 (23% of residents versus 100% of staff physicians, p = 0.001) and 19 (92.3% of residents versus 58.3% of staff physicians, p = 0.01), corresponding to the avoidance, acceptance and professional perspective dimensions.

Conclusion: Less than 20% of pediatric physicians have a positive attitude towards death. Most didn't value death as a passage or transition to a better life, or as a solution to life's problems.