PPT41 Does clinical speciality impact how clinicians talk about death? A thematic analysis of death cafes taking place amongst acute hospital clinicians

<h3>Introduction</h3> Research has indicated that different healthcare specialities tend to different personality profiles. This qualitative research explores the question of differences in how clinicians in different specialities talk about death. Death Cafes were held as a novel research approach to exploring clinician attitudes towards death and dying. <h3>Method</h3> <h3>Design</h3> Qualitative, thematic analysis. <h3>Data collection</h3> The Death Café format served as a focus group, facilitated in line with death café guidance by the researcher. Cafes took place in Intensive Care, Emergency Medicine, Respiratory, General Surgery, Trauma/Orthopaedics and Community Team. <h3>Analysis</h3> Each café was recorded and transcribed, the process of inductive coding was used; words and phrases were assigned as codes. Categories and themes were identified, and the distribution of themes across the cafes compared. Code allocation was completed by the primary researcher, with member checking undertaken by the supervising consultant. <h3>Results</h3> Six Death Cafes were held between October 2023 and March 2024. A total of 50 people attended, each café attended by 5-12 participants. 70% of participants were doctors, experience ranged between 0-5 and &gt;30 years and 48% of participants were female. The total number of codes was 631; each café had between 89 and 150 codes. <h3>Categories identified</h3> ‘Participant Narratives’, Discussions and Decisions’, ‘Deaths’ and ‘Environment’. ‘Participant Narratives’ codes were most frequent in each café, except Respiratory, where ‘Discussions and Decisions’ was the highest. ‘Participant emotions/Self Reflections’ was proportionally the highest sub-theme in 50% of cafes, equating to 17% of all codes. <h3>Conclusions</h3> Although clinical experiences and personal profiles may vary between specialities, when it comes to talking about death, self-reflection and emotional introspection were universal. Further research is needed to evaluate the impact of hosting death cafes in NHS settings on staff wellbeing and cultural competencies around death and dying.