Exploring the needs and barriers for death education in China: Getting answers from heart transplant recipients' inner experience of death

BACKGROUND: Promoting reflection about death may support better living, and how to carry out death education is an important issue to be addressed across the world. The purpose of the current study was to explore the attitude of heart transplant recipients toward death and their inner real experience to provide information for the development of death education strategies. METHODS: A phenomenological qualitative study was conducted using a snowball method. A total of 11 patients who had undergone heart transplantation more than 1-year ago were recruited for the current study for semi-structured interviews. RESULTS: A total of five themes were identified: “Not avoid talking about death,” “Feeling fear about the pain in the process of death”, “Wanting a good death at the end of life,” “The richness of feelings during near-death is surprising,” and “Being close to death makes people more receptive to death.” CONCLUSION: Heart transplant recipients have a positive attitude toward death and wish for “good death” at the end of life. These patients' near-death experiences and positive attitudes toward death during the course of their illness provided evidence of the need for death education in China and supported the experiential approach to death education.