Exploring death literacy with allied health professionals: A cross-sectional survey in Australia

Allied health clinicians need strong death literacy to navigate loss, grief, dying, and death. Their roles include system navigation, advocacy, and psychosocial support, often bridging healthcare, community, and social services. Adequate death literacy is essential for holistic, compassionate care. This study assessed death literacy among allied health clinicians in the Central Coast region of New South Wales, Australia.

An anonymous, cross-sectional online survey conducted between February and March 2025 collected demographic, professional, and 29-item Death Literacy Index-Revised (DLI-R) data. Subsequent analyses compared overall and subscale death literacy scores across Central Coast allied health disciplines and against published Australian norms for the (a) general population, (b) health professionals, and (c) end-of-life and bereavement care volunteers.

A total of 144 allied health clinicians completed the survey, including nutrition and dietetics, physiotherapy, podiatry, psychology, occupational therapy, speech pathology, social work, oral health, counselling, allied health assistants, and other disciplines. There were significant differences in the overall death literacy scores across allied health disciplines, with differences in mean scores ranging from 0.280 to 1.238 (p < 0.01). These differences extended to most subscales; however, after adjusting for potentially confounding characteristics, only social work remained significantly different from the "other" group in overall scores. Subscale differences persisted, including higher hands-on care scores in physiotherapy and occupational therapy, and higher factual and community knowledge scores in social work, compared with the "other" group. Overall, allied health clinicians' death literacy (mean = 5.671) was significantly higher than Australian Online Research Panel norms for the general population (mean = 4.830; p < .001); and lower than health professionals (mean = 6.510; p < .001); end of life care volunteers (mean = 6.640; p < .001); and grief and bereavement care volunteers (mean = 6.590; p < .001).

Allied health clinicians appear to hold some discipline-specific strengths in death literacy subscales. Although overall death literacy was higher than that of the general population, it remained lower than that of health professionals, end-of-life care volunteers, and volunteers in grief and bereavement. These findings highlight gaps in allied health workers' ability to understand, access, and act on end-of-life care options.