This study is a descriptive research to investigate the effects of death anxiety, family support, and knowledge of advanced medical directive on the attitudes toward advanced medical directive in aged patients with a coronary artery disease. It is implemented to provide basic data for the development of educational and institutional interventions to spread positive awareness of advanced medical directive and improve autonomous decision-making ability of the elderly.
The research subjects were 187 coronary artery diseased patients over the age of 65 who were received inpatient and outpatient treatment at a general hospital located in 'D' Metropolitan City. In addition, from July 8, 2022 to August 31, 2022, the researcher directly distributed the questionnaire to the subjects, and collected the data filled out by patients.
The results of this study are as follows. The general characteristics of subjects with statistically significant differences in their attitude toward advanced medical directive were as follows. The attitudes toward advanced medical directive of the subject who were high school graduates and college graduates or higher, had a religion, and considered their subjective health status to be 'low', and had experience of thinking about their own deaths were positive. Furthermore, it was showed a statistically negative correlation with death anxiety, while a positive correlation with family support and knowledge of advanced medical directive. As a result of regression analysis showed that the people who feel the lower the death anxiety, the more religious, the higher the knowledge of advanced medical directive, the higher family support, and the more 'low' the subjective health status, positive about attitudes toward advanced medical directive. The explanatory power was 31.3%.