Attitudes of nursing students towards euthanasia

Nursing students are the members of medical team so investigation on their attitudes about euthanasia is interested for researchers. Various studies revealed that the majority of nurses and nursing students are opposed with euthanasia; however there are some dilemmas in those findings. The current study conducted to explore the nursing students’ attitudes about euthanasia.
In the current cross sectional study, 382 nursing students were enrolled through convenience sampling method. Data gathering was done using the short form questionnaire of euthanasia. Validity and reliability of the tool were examined. All data were analyzed with SPSS software.
Findings: The mean and standard deviation of age was 23.4±1.3 year, and the majority (61.5%) was female. Near to half of the participants (50.5%) stated that their religious believes effects on their attitudes towards euthanasia. There was acceptable for 173 participants (45.2%) to use drugs in lethal dose on the explicit request of the patients with terminal illness or extreme uncontrollable pain. the participants who had clinical experiences stated more tendency to do euthanasia.
The rate of attitudes towards euthanasia in current study was more than other similar studies. More studies in this regards are recommended.