Developing palliative care competencies for the education of entry level baccalaureate prepared Canadian nurses.

Educational preparation of health professionals for Palliative and End of Life Care (PEOLC) is inadequate, and nurses are no exception. In 2004, the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing struck a Task Force to develop PEOLC competencies to address this issue. The development of national PEOLC nursing competencies involved a multi-step, emergent, interactive, and iterative process. An overarching principle guiding this process was building national consensus about the essential PEOLC specific competencies for nurses among experts in this field while simultaneously generating, revising, and refining them. There have been three stages in this iterative, multi-step process: 1) Generating a preliminary set of competencies, 2) Building a national consensus among educators and experts in the field on PEOLC specific competencies for nurses, and 3) Refining the consensus based competencies for curriculum development. Ongoing follow up work for this project is focusing on the integration of these competencies into nursing curricula.

Developing a Palliative Care Competency Framework for Health Professionals and Volunteers: The Nova Scotian Experience.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: In 2014, Nova Scotia released a provincial palliative care strategy and implementation working groups were established. The Capacity Building and Practice Change Working Group, comprised of health professionals, public advisors, academics, educators, and a volunteer supervisor, was asked to select palliative care education programs for health professionals and volunteers. The first step in achieving this mandate was to establish competencies for health professionals and volunteers caring for patients with life-limiting illness and their families and those specializing in palliative care. METHODS: In 2015, a literature search for palliative care competencies and an environmental scan of related education programs were conducted. The Irish Palliative Care Competence Framework serves as the foundation of the Nova Scotia Palliative Care Competency Framework. Additional disciplines and competencies were added and any competencies not specific to palliative care were removed. To highlight interprofessional practice, the framework illustrates shared and discipline-specific competencies. Stakeholders were asked to validate the framework and map the competencies to educational programs. Numerous rounds of review refined the framework. RESULTS: The framework includes competencies for 22 disciplines, 9 nursing specialties, and 4 physician specialties. CONCLUSIONS: The framework, released in 2017, and the selection and implementation of education programs were a significant undertaking. The framework will support the implementation of the Nova Scotia Integrated Palliative Care Strategy, enhance the interprofessional nature of palliative care, and guide the further implementation of education programs. Other jurisdictions have expressed considerable interest in the framework.

Bringing theory to life: engaging nursing students in a collaborative population-based screening project.

A collaborative population-based project for bowel cancer prevention provided an ideal opportunity to involve nursing students in applying theory to practice. In this article, described is how the engagement of students and subsequent application of a population health template contributed to a community-based bowel cancer education and screening campaign. The campaign was a valuable teaching-learning experience for students and contributed to the goal of reducing and reporting on the number of bowel cancer deaths in the local area. Project evaluation data provide insight into student learning outcomes and reveal ways to strengthen the population health initiative for future years. Originally, a scholarly pursuit of discovery and application developed in response to growing rates of bowel cancer and advances in effective screening programs, the project has evolved into the domain of teaching and learning. This evolution has benefited students, project organizers and community members.

Information technology and hospice palliative care: social, cultural, ethical and technical implications in a rural setting.

OBJECTIVE: There is a need to better understand the specific settings in which health information technology (HIT) is used and implemented. Factors that will determine the successful implementation of HIT are context-specific and often reside not at the technical level but rather at the process and people level. This paper provides the results of a needs assessment for HIT to support hospice palliative care (HPC) delivery in rural settings. METHODS: Roundtable discussions using the nominal group technique were done to identify priority issues regarding HIT usage to support rural HPC delivery. Qualitative content analysis was then used to identify sociotechnical themes from the roundtable data. RESULTS: Twenty priority issues were identified at the roundtable session. Content analysis grouped the priority issues into one central theme and five supporting themes to form a sociotechnical framework for patient-centered care in rural settings. CONCLUSION: There are several sociotechnical themes and associated issues that need to be considered prior to implementing HIT in rural HPC settings. Proactive evaluation of these issues can enhance HIT implementation and also help to make ethical aspects of HIT design more explicit.