Relevance of Palliative Care Training in Nursing Practice Literature review

Relevance of Palliative Care Training in Nursing Practice - Literature review Example Palliative care has generally been linked with end-of-life care of cancer patients, but considering its effectiveness in reducing the suffering of patients and their family the concept has now been extended to include non-cancer population as well. "Dying patients need to be assured that their destiny lies in the hands of well trained, multi-disciplinary, professional team because often the death is no longer capable of caring for themselves and their rights." (Gronemeyer, et al 2005, p.1). Hence, effective implementation of palliative care will be possible only through adequate training and grooming of health care providers. Since nurses interact most with patients and act as intermediaries between other health care providers and patients and their family members it is imperative that addressing the training needs of nurses is crucial for the success of palliative care program. As such, an attempt has been made to analyze select articles related to experimental models of palliative care and training strategies relevant to nursing practice. University of Wollongong Library's electronic resources was searched for locating relevant articles. Though Google scholar has larger volumes of articles, considering the fact that Proquest database covers specific nursing-related peer-reviewed journal articles, the search was limited to Proquest database only. The basic search question used was 'Palliative care', which retrieved 7982 articles from Proquest. A further search of the database for 'medical sciences-Nursing and allied health sources' shortlisted number of articles to 130. When the results were limited to full-text documents of scholarly journals 23 articles have been retrieved. Five articles with different area of coverage, such as (1) Nurses' perceptions around providing palliative care for long-term care residents with dementia; (2) Providing pediatric palliative care through a pediatric supportive care team; (3) Using high-fidelity simulation to educate nursing students about end-of-life care; (4) Enhancing meaning i n palliative care practice: A meaning-centred intervention to promote job satisfaction; and (5) Spiritual development of nursing students: Developing competence to provide spiritual care to patients at the end of life. Since large volumes of research articles (303,000) have been retrieved from Google Scholar using the catchphrase 'Palliative care' and only 5 articles have to be selected for the literature review it has been decided to search Proquest database and cover palliative care experiences in two challenging areas, such as pediatrics and geriatrics (dementia), and three articles covering innovative training approaches; Nurses' perceptions around providing palliative care for long-term care residents with dementia. The study conducted by Kaasalainen et al (2007) explores nurses' perceptions around providing palliative care for long-term care (LTC) residents with dementia, using a qualitative descriptive design. The inspiration for this study was the unprecedented increase in a ged care population with cognitive impairment and identification of 'many barriers to optimal palliative care in LTC homes' in Canada. Dementia is a progressively degenerating physical condition leading to gradual loss of cognitive abilities.