Palliative Care: Importance of the Subject for Medical Students

ABSTRACT Introduction Palliative care are actions that seek to act on the quality of life of sick people and their families, alleviating and preventing suffering in the face of a terminal illness. The insertion of the palliative care theme in the undergraduate medical curriculum offers possibilities for future physicians to face the limitations / implications that they will undergo in their professional life and even during graduation. Objective To identify the importance of the Palliative Care theme for undergraduate students in Medicine. Methodology This is a quantitative, descriptive and cross-sectional study. An adapted version of the Instrument “PEAS – Physicians’ End-of-Life Care Attitude Scale” was used as instrument. 37 Likert-type questions were used to meet the aims of the study. The collection was made in 2015, in a random, non-probabilistic sample, composed of 134 students who were attending the last two years (internship) of Medicine School of a Brazilian Federal University. Data were analyzed in the SPSS program. Results Of the 134 participants, 59.7% were female, aged between 22 and 37 years. The results indicate that 85.84% of students need some supervision or basic instruction to discuss palliative care and withdrawal of treatment with patients and their families. Regarding the clinical management of the terminal patient, 78.35% consider themselves capable of handling alone or under minimal supervision, symptoms such as constipation or vomiting, but only 19.05% consider themselves capable of handling symptoms such as terminal delirium or dyspnea. Although 41.8% of students do not care about their own death, 88.1% feel anxious or uncomfortable about the death of their patient. The inclusion in the medical curriculum of communication skills in Palliative Care and end-of-life ethics was considered important or very important by 95.5% of the students interviewed. Conclusion Data showed that the students identify the deficiencies caused by the absence or limitation of the Palliative Care teaching during graduation and are interested in seeing the theme included as a discipline in the medical curriculum, which suggests further studies on the topic.