2022, Vol. 4, Issue 1, Part A

Background: Euthanasia is made up of two words i.e. eu, means “good” and thanatos means “death,” which is basically derived from Greek word and early its signified a “good” or “easy” death. Euthanasia is defined as administering a lethal agent by clinician to a patient to relieve him/her from intolerable and incurable suffering. Two types of Euthanasia are practicing in India i.e., “active” or “passive.” Active euthanasia in which a clinician deliberately work in such a way to end a patient's life. In Passive euthanasia clinician withholds or withdraws all treatment necessary to maintain life.

Euthanasia Is still not that much used by the clinician in India, not much studies were conducted to evaluate the attitude of nurses towards euthanasia in India; hence, this study was conducted to know the current attitude of nurses towards euthanasia in India.

Material and Methods: In this Descriptive design, all qualified registered nurses working in different hospitals and in teaching institutes all over India were invited to participate. The Euthanasia Attitude Scale (EAS) was used to assess the nurses’ attitude towards euthanasia. Out of 200 nurses who fit the criteria, 155 participated in the study 91.1% (n=138) were female and 8.9% (n=17) were male.

Result: In total, 57.4%, 3.2% and 39.5% of nurses reported a negative, neutral and positive attitude to euthanasia respectively. Nurses reported most negative attitude to domain ‘practical consideration’ and the most positive attitude to the domain ‘treasuring life’.

Conclusion: The majority of nurses were found to have negative attitudes to euthanasia. We recommend that future studies should be conducted to examine nurses’ attitudes to euthanasia in different cultures and countries all over the world to determine the role of culture and religious beliefs as well as nurses beliefs in different countries all over the world in attitude to euthanasia.