Abstract

124 Japanese hospital nurses responded to a questionnaire on end-of-life ethical issues they encounter in working with dying patients. This paper reports data from three open-ended questions focused on types and frequency of these ethical dilemmas. These data underwent a content analysis. Additionally, we report data from four force-choice questions about where patient die, their knowledge of alternatives to hospital care, and whether they know they are terminally ill.Five categories emerged as ethical issues from the open-ended question analysis and were arranged by response frequency. Fixed choice question data indicated that patients may not know alternatives to hospitals but they often know they are dying. These nurses viewed the ethical problem of non-disclosure coupled with physician paternalism as the major problem for patients and one that greatly affected the ethics for nurses clinically caring for dying patients