University Hospital La Paz Madrid

Many health care professionals have to deal regularly with their patients ’ deaths and relatives ’ bereavement, but frequently they have not been trained in this area, and therefore the psychological cost is very high. The authors’principal aim in this work is to describe health care professionals ’ perceptions about death. A group of health care professionals who worked with children was compared with a group who worked with elderly people. Results showed that emotional aspects were per-ceived as more important than biomedical aspects in the death process. Between the groups, some differences were detected relating to the perception of the proxim-ity of members ’ own deaths, and the authors could also observe that the death of a loved one was perceived as more important than their own death. These result