This study focuses on how medical students perceive the way that undergraduate medical education prepares them to deal with death, and to understand what it means to these students to deal with death and dying in their training. This was a qualitative, exploratory, and descriptive study. The data collection used semi-structured interviews with five medical students that were already in their internship (the final stage of undergraduate training in Brazil), analyzed on the basis of Bardin's content analysis technique. The findings presented here refer to only one of the analytical categories for the study - "feeling prepared in the face of death and dying". The study's principal finding in this category is a feeling of unpreparedness, highlighted by the interviewees, especially as a function of the necessary objectivity and "professional" distancing from the dying patient.
Death; Confronting Death Attitude; Therapeutic Limit; Medical Education; Curriculum