Analysis of COMPASsion and Humanisation of Adolescents Facing the End-of-life Processes.

Condition(s) studied

Investigational drug(s) / intervention(s)

questionnaire: COOL Scale and DAS

Discussion group: Through discussion groups with students in secondary schools and university separately, a compassionate plan will be designed

Reflective diary: Students can modify the interventions adapting them to their requirements to get the compassion needed for those in need.

Study summary

The investigators want to work on compassion, understood as the recognition of the suffering of others that motivates us to try to alleviate it. The goal of this Multicenter project, with a mixed sequential transformative methodology, is to analyze the impact of a participatory process of awareness and reflection on compassion, in the face of end-of-life processes, in adolescents aged 12-23 years in 6 Spanish provinces, and to understand how the participatory process can transform and improve their compassion.

As the adolescents must be the protagonists of change, the study will be conducted with students enrolled in one public secondary school and in one degree in a public University, that belongs to the same "health area" in each province. The investigators also include families' and teachers' knowledge of the context because it can support the interventions of change proposals.

Compassion will be assessed using the Compassion for the Lives of Others Scale (COOLS), comprising 26 items. Similarly, adolescents' attitudes toward death are another important concept and will be explored through the Death Anxiety Scale (DAS), which has 15 questions. Both scales will be distributed to the adolescents, requesting their permission anonymously.

After the survey, a second phase will start with a Participatory Action Research (PAR) with different activities. The objective is to generate awareness of the need to improve it, allowing the participants to design the interventions, based on evidence-based proposals (cinema forum, colloquiums with testimonies of volunteers accompanying palliative patients, organization of Death Cafe, artistic and literary activities, generation of grief groups, etc.).

At the end of the project, the investigators will evaluate the adolescent compassion level and create discussion groups again to understand the impact of the interventions.

With this project, the investigators will empower new generations of people to encourage, facilitate, support, and celebrate mutual care and family and community development in end-of-life processes. The translation and implications of the results for clinical practice will contribute to reducing inequalities in health research in a vulnerable group of special interest, especially when treatments can do nothing for their survival but with interventions such as those in this study, the investigators can ensure quality and dignity of life as long as there is life.

Eligibility

Primary outcome measure(s)

• Describe and improve the level of compassion of high school and university students. — first 8 weeks and the last 8 weeks of the academy year
  Compassion is understood as the recognition of the suffering of others that motivates us to try to alleviate it. Compassion will be assessed using the "Compassion for the Lives of Others Scale" (COOL Scale), which comprises 26 items, of which 13 correspond to the empathy dimension and the remaining 13 to the relief of suffering dimension, presented on a 7-point Likert scale format, graded according to agreement with the statement (from 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree). The scale provides an overall score for the degree of compassion towards others as well as a score for each subscale (empathy and relief of suffering).
• Describe and improve the attitude towards death of high school and university students. — first 8 weeks and the last 8 weeks of the academy year
  The Death Anxiety Scale (DAS) assesses "fear of death, fear of illness, preoccupation with time, preoccupation with death", it comprises 15 self-administered dichotomous (true or false) response items. Items 1, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 are scored 1 point if the answer is true and 0 points if it is false; conversely, the other six items, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 15, are scored 1 point if the answer is false. The range of total scores for Death Anxiety was between 0 and 15, with higher scores indicating higher Death Anxiety.

Trial sites (1)

Other trials for the same condition