Palliative care in nursing training: higher education course coordinators' perception.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVES: to analyze undergraduate nursing course coordinators' perception about nursing training in palliative care. METHODS: a descriptive study, with a qualitative approach and thematic content analysis, carried out with coordinators of nursing courses in Higher Education Institutions in Rio Grande do Norte. RESULTS: three thematic categories emerged Nursing training in palliative care; Potentialities for teaching palliative care; and Challenges of teaching in palliative care. The coordinators described as potentialities transversality, theoretical and practical approach, optional subject, university extensions, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinary approach, and as challenges biomedical model in health education and insufficient professor training. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS palliative care teaching in the researched institutions in the nursing education process is approached in an incipient and fragmented way, and almost always without having a specific curricular component on the subject, being present as one of its contents.