Are All Deaths the Same for Physicians and Nurses?: Stereotype Questions Physicians and Nurses Utilize to Characterize a Person Who Has Died

Abstract

How do healthcare professionals classify or characterize human beings: how do they identify and define a patient or in the case of this study a dead person? Healthcare professionals are fairly regularly exposed to human beings dying. Part of their duty is to postpone death but, death being inevitable, they regularly lose the fight. This study aims to determine how healthcare professionals classify human beings by asking only 1 question, and allowing respondents to provide 5 answers of their own making (“You are exposed to a dead person, victim of a car accident. Apart from name and surname, what are the 5 questions you would ask?”). Thereby, it is hoped to avoid both conflicts with responsibilities of healthcare professionals and predetermining the answers. As described above, one self-administered open question related to a very short story had to be answered anonymously and was asked by e-mail. As a result of the analysis, a number of stereotype question sets were obtained through the answers of the respondents. The stereotype questions and derived thought concepts provide an insight into the awareness and (prioritized) values of healthcare professionals in Turkey. In the replies, questions related to the personal background of the dead (such as age, marital status, and parenthood) had the highest frequency, while questions of professional relevance followed with medium frequency. A question relating to the consent of the deceased to organ donation was almost never asked. It is suggested that any potential educational material for healthcare personnel should be reviewed in order to increase awareness of relevant issues.