A survey of death anxiety among personnel of a hospital in Sari

(Received 12 Jun, 2008; Accepted 12 Nov, 2008) Abstract Background and purpose: Death anxiety is defined as anxiety caused by conscious and unconscious fear of death that has relations with several variables. The aim for this study is to estimate the prevalence of death anxiety among a hospital staff in SariMaterials and methods: This is a descriptive study and data was collected through a questionnaire. The number of cases was 576. The questionnaire (Templer’s Death Anxiety Scale) includes 15 True-False questions. After data collection processing was done through spss.16 and analyzing performed through T-test and Chi-square test.Results: The age range was 20-53. 42.2% of cases had low death anxiety and 57.8% had high death anxiety. The mean of scores achieved by cases through questionnaire was 7.70 ± 3.133 by women and 6.19 ± 2.552 by men. The degree of death anxiety has had significant correlation with variable of sex while has had no relation with age, marriage condition, having or lack of child, level of graduation and career condition.Conclusion: The results of this study shows that the most cases have had high degrees of death anxiety that can be because of the special condition of working or the combination of cases's sex and age. With caution to results, it is recommended to Mental Health interventions to the same population to improve the mental health Quality additionally perform more comprehensive studies in more generally populations. J Mazand Univ Med Sci 2008; 18(67): 84-90 (Persian)