Perspectives of an international education initiative in children's palliative care

Abstract

Education is viewed as central to improving future palliative care for children and families across all countries. International education initiatives will ensure practitioners are aware of global health issues and can provide culturally sensitive care. Creative and innovative means of meeting such directives are required to achieve meaningful student learning. This paper focuses on one innovation, a children's palliative care workshop using case studies as a teaching method, with nursing students from the USA and nursing and midwifery students from the UK. Key learning points arising from student evaluation were recorded under three main themes, these were: differences across countries, similarities across countries, and making learning fun and memorable. Findings indicated that this joint learning activity was viewed positively by all students and has enabled them to learn with and from each other, potentially impacting on their future practice.

Palliative care education and its effectiveness: a systematic review

“…Communication. Thirteen studies focused on improving healthcare professionals' communication skills to understand patients' stories, successfully conduct family meetings, and strengthen family relationships [28,30,31,32,33,38,43,44,45,48,49,50,51]. One study focused on improving volunteers' communication skills with patients and their families [52].…”

“…Through the themes, participants learnt who was the substitute decision-maker for an incapable patient, the role of medical staff in ethical decision making, and the importance of information and discussion in the decision-making process around organ donation. There were five articles where ethical and legal issues were discussed in the program but did not provide details [29,31,44,51,54].…”

“…Grief and bereavement. Grief and bereavement were addressed in 13 articles (12 for healthcare professionals and one for family caregivers), including topics of the expression of grief and the grieving process [60,31,33,38,51,58,59]; bereavement support services [32,43,49]; theories of grief and bereavement [53]; and grief, loss, and bereavement of bereaved parents [30,41]. Participants learned of the five stages of grief; how to address loss, grief, bereavement issues for patients, their families, and the associated healthcare workers; and how to support grieved and bereaved family caregivers.…”

“…Healthcare system, institutional issues, and community-based care. Eight studies explored the following topics: lessons from the system failure in end-of-life care [61]; community clinical end-of-life care [55]; healthcare models of excellence in end-of-life care [52]; organisations of palliative care and services provision [33,51]; politics, healthcare system, and palliative care [54,59].…”

“…A total of 26 studies utilised palliative care materials to develop a PCE program for healthcare professionals, 22 of which used self-developed palliative care materials [28,31,32,33,34,36,37,39,40,42,43,44,46,47,48,49,51,53,56,57,58,59] and four of which employed existing online resources [36,46,55,63]. There were three studies that utilised the self-developed palliative care materials to develop PCE programs for family caregivers.…”