Abstract:

Living in the time when the goal of social organizations is to improve the quality of life, the issue about public attitude towards death becomes topical. Taking into account that the attitude to death is closely linked to learning to know and be able to do and its prerequisite is the recognition of our ignorance and the lack of knowledge, and that due to the evolution of our culture death as an uncontrollable life's entity is experienced more acutely than ever before, the aim of this study is to find out palliative ward patients’ opinions of the quality of life and the meaning of learning and to compare them with opinions of people who have not directly experienced the closeness of death yet. In order to study understanding of the quality of life and the meaning of learning of 50 palliative care unit patients, that is of people with radically incurable, progressive diseases, a questionnaire with 4 unfinished sentences and 1 question was designed. Comparison of the obtained results with the results obtained analogously in three other groups of respondents: 20-24 year old students, 70-95 year olds and people with special needs, provided an opportunity to draw conclusions about the link between priority values in life and the gained experience. The results of the study confirm that the loss in the lives of many people makes it possible to appreciate values which are not considered to be as values on daily basis prior to the loss. In the answers of the palliative care patients the most frequently mentioned aspect improving the quality of life and the most important thing learnt during the lifetime are the qualities which pertain to communication. The results of the study indicate that many people lack the skill to deal with their own feelings of loneliness in the case of a close relative's death or fear of their own death. Palliative ward patients relatively often are of the opinion that learning makes sense only in the youth, or that there is no sense in learning at all, which is accompanied by regrets about earning an insufficient amount of money, disappointment in the formal communication or in the communication with the new generation.

Keywords:

Experience, quality of life, meaning of learning, death, personal understanding, palliative care patients.