Volume 53, July–August 2024, Pages 131-139Author links open overlay panel, Highlights•

More nurses with competence and confidence in palliative care delivery are needed.

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Nurses who enter long-term care practice do not feel prepared to deliver palliative care.

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Stronger palliative education initiatives are needed in nursing programs.

AbstractBackground

With the aging population, there is an increased need for nurses with competence in chronic illness and palliative care management particularly in long-term care settings. The incorporation of palliative care education in nursing curricula has been explored previously.

Purpose

This review aimed to appraise the current literature on the state of palliative care education in academia and how it impacts the preparedness of nurses to enter long-term care post-graduation. There has not been an integrative review exploring curriculum-based palliative care education for long-term care.

Method

This review was guided by the method of Whittemore and Knafl using critical appraisal tools. The CINAHL, Cochrane, EBSCO, ERIC, Journals@Ovid, Medline, PsycINFO, and ScienceDirect databases were searched for peer-reviewed literature from 2017 to 2022.

Results

Sixteen items met the search criteria for appraisal, and 11 items were retained for discussion.

Conclusion

There is a gap in nursing curricula in preparing nurses for the situations faced by long-term care nurses. Long-term care nurses develop strong bonds with residents and families and often lack time, space, and resources to cultivate the confidence and competence as palliative situations arise. More research is needed to determine the best placement in nursing programs for palliative-based long-term care education.

Section snippetsBackground

LTC facilities may be referred to as skilled nursing facilities, care homes, nursing homes, or residential care homes depending on the country or state they are situated (Iida et al., 2020). These are facilities where individuals receive care in a residential setting, and hence, rather than being called patients, the individuals living in these settings are called residents. The residents are typically older adults who are chronically and seriously ill, often needing skilled palliative care (

Method

The integrative review process was guided by the five-step framework of Whittemore and Knafl (2005). The steps include problem identification, literature search, data evaluation, data analysis, and presentation.

Results

In total there were four review articles (Bolt et al., 2019; Iida et al., 2020; Moore et al., 2020; Pesut & Greig, 2018), two qualitative studies (Frey et al., 2019; Tang et al., 2022), four quantitative studies (Kaasalainen et al., 2017; Kunte et al., 2017; Lamppu et al., 2021; O'Shea & Mager, 2019) including one randomized control trial (Lamppu et al., 2021) and one quasi-experimental study (O'Shea & Mager, 2019), and one mixed method study (Lippe et al., 2017). Three studies were from the

Discussion

LTC nurses indicated that there were areas where they felt that they required more education such as grief and bereavement (Tang et al., 2022), symptom management, pain management, and advanced dementia care (Bolt et al., 2019). Although traditional baccalaureate programs offer education in lifespan issues, conditions, and symptoms and some may offer palliative training such as ELNEC (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2023a, American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2023b), these

Conclusion

The LTC sector is a unique area where palliative and end of life care is an essential skill. The number of older adults in LTC facilities is expected to increase, and thus there is a need for more nurses skilled in palliative care. Nurses employed in LTC facilities find educational and organizational challenges to attending trainings to fulfill palliative care gaps once they are already working. For these gaps to be addressed, more initiatives to address preparing nurses to have essential

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Lisa A. Cross: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Sylvia Abbeyquaye: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Declaration of competing interest

No disclosures.

Acknowledgment

No acknowledgements.

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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