Highlights
- •Palliative communication is an essential component of end-of-life care, affecting patient and family experience as well as nurse moral distress and job attrition.
- •Multifactorial constraints on end-of-life care content in prelicensure training programs have placed the onus on hiring organizations to provide training in palliative care competencies.
- •A simulation-based learning experience increased critical care nurse comfort with palliative communication when combined with the End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium adult critical care course.
- •Qualitative feedback indicated that the simulation experience provided valuable hands-on experience for practice of palliative communication techniques.
Abstract
Background
Palliative communication is a vital aspect of patient and family-centered end-of-life
care in the intensive care unit. Despite this, specialty-specific training and education
in palliative communication are generally limited for critical care nurses. The purpose
of this quality improvement project was to assess the effect of adding a simulation-based
learning experience to the existing End of Life Nursing Education Consortium adult
critical care course on critical care nurse comfort with palliative communication
as a component of end-of-life care.
Method
Using a pretest/post-test design, 11 critical care nurse participants completed a
measure of comfort related to end-of-life communication prior to the course and immediately
following the simulation experience.
Result
A paired-samples t-test showed a statistically increase in comfort with palliative
communication from the pretest (M = 56.36, SE = 2.40) to post-test (M = 48.27, SE = 2.97),
t (10) = 2.54, p = .30 (two-tailed), The mean decrease in scores was 8.09, 95% CI (0.98, 15.91). Qualitative
survey responses indicated that the simulation provided valuable practice of palliative
communication techniques.
Conclusion
A simulation-based learning experience incorporated into an existing palliative care
education course is feasible to implement and increased critical care nurse comfort
with palliative communication at end-of-life.
KEYWORDS
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References
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: February 25, 2023
Identification
Copyright
© 2023 International Nursing Association for Clinical Simulation and Learning. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
