| When an individual reaches the end-of-life stage of his or her life, having all available treatment options is vital to ensuring patient autonomy and a dignified dying process. This study takes a policy focused look at a very controversial end-of-life care option, physician-assisted suicide. The history of the assisted suicide movement in the United States is investigated, including events and landmark legal cases, in order to gain an understanding of how the current physician assisted suicide landscape has been formed. It is also important to look at past events to get a sense of potential future policy discussions related to physician assisted suicide, and its possible implementation in states like Florida.;This study examined the attitudes of Florida nurse practitioners as they relate to physician assisted suicide (a practice currently banned in the State of Florida) and if a set of demographic factors can act as predictors of those attitudes. After obtaining participant data from a Florida Department of Health data set, a two-part questionnaire was sent to a sample of Florida Nurse Practitioners, the participants of this study. Data will be collected using the Domino Survey of Opinions on Physician Assisted Suicide, the only psychometric scale available that measures attitudes towards this practice. A demographic questionnaire accompanied the Domino Survey, in order to solicit demographic data, the independent variables of this study (age, gender, race/ethnicity, religion/religious association, political affiliation, practice specialty, and experience providing end-of-life care. The author used t-tests, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and a multivariate logistic regression to measure differences in attitudes, and to determine which variables could be used to predict attitudes toward physician assisted suicide. The dependent variable of this study will be the positive and/or negative attitude of the participating nurse practitioners. |
