Palliative Care Education For Pediatric Nurses

Of all the various healthcare professionals that provide care to children and their families facing life’s end, no one spends more time at the bedside observing, critically thinking, consulting, and providing direct care than the pediatric nurse. Previous research, however, demonstrates that undergraduate education has not prepared nurses to provide optimum endof-life (EOL) care (Ferrell, Grant, & Virani, 1999; Ferrell, Virani, & Grant, 1999). Although many reasons have been cited in the literature for this inadequacy, the fact remains that when nurses complete their basic education and enter practice, they often are grossly unprepared to care for children and families in need of end-of-life care (Field & Behrman, 2003). not equipped to deal with these many difficult issues. Deficiencies in end-of-life (EOL) content in nursing textbooks and in nursing school curriculum have illequipped pediatric nurses to assist children and families facing the end of life (Ferrell, Virani, et al., 1999). Previous researchers have documented that nurses also face ethical dilemmas in the clinical setting, such as conflicts about administering pain medication to patients at the end of life, communicating with patients and families, and nursing involvement in patient decision-making regarding foregoing nutrition and hydration (American Nurses Association, 1992, 1994; Asch,1996; Ferrell & Coyle, 2002). In 2002, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released their report on pediatric palliative care titled “When Children Die: Improving Palliative and End of Life Care for Children and Their Families.” This report called for improved professional education to address the care of children at the end of life and their families. The IOM reported that approximately 400,000 children in the United States are living every day with a chronic, life-threatening condition, and that 53,000 of these children die annually (Field & Behrman, 2003). Yet due to the numerous years of educational deficiencies related to EOL care, it became evident that further education must be provided to pediatric nurses. Hence, the End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium Pediatric Palliative Care (ELNEC-PPC) training program was developed to address these educational deficiencies.