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Updated: Jul 12, 2025

Setup and Execution of the Rapid Cycle Deliberate Practice Death Notification Curriculum
Published on: August 5, 2020
Assessment of a medical student mentoring programme to improve attitudes related to grief and coping with death
Santiago Álvarez-Montero1, Paula Crespí1, Juan Gómez-Salgado2,3
1Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, Madrid, Spain.
Objectives:
To evaluate the impact of a mentoring programme for medical students doing a palliative care rotation, aimed at improving coping with death and attitudes towards the suffering produced by illness.
Methods:
A quasi-experimental study without a control group was carried out on second-year medical students. Five 1-h group sessions were conducted. Attitudes towards grief and coping with death were assessed before the mentoring programme began and afterwards, using the Brief Humanizar Scale and the Bugen's Coping with Death Scale, respectively.
Results:
In terms of the sense of grieving as measured by the Brief Humanizar Scale, the mean score for the 'Burden' factor was 7 points and for the 'Change' factor it was 28.6, indicating that suffering makes more sense as a lever for positive change than as a burden. Regarding Bugen's Coping with Death Scale, the mean score was 127.8 points before the mentoring programme and 139.2 afterwards. Hence, the score after the mentoring programme increased by 11.4 points, improving strategies to cope with death.
Conclusion:
Medical professionals must cope with death and end-of-life patients. In addition to scientific knowledge, students need to acquire competencies for better coping with the death of patients, with mentoring programmes helping to enhance this process of learning.
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