Overview of Palliative Care Curriculum's for Nursing Students

Providing palliative care to the elderly and dying patients is a now and the future challenge. Nurses are the first group that provided palliative care and access and identifying the pain and suffering of patients is their first professional care. Therefore, palliative care education to nursing students can help to better care of these patients. The aim of this study was to determine the elements of palliative care curriculum for nursing students.

In this narrative review study, database of Magiran, SID, PubMed, Science Direct and Springer were searched. Articles were searched from 2000 to 2017 using keywords such as education, curriculum, palliative care and nursing.

A total of 1024 articles were found. 9 papers were selected for analysis. Four elements of curriculum including goal, content, teaching methods and evaluation of palliative care curriculum were accessed. The goal of this curriculum is to educate nursing students about end of life care and palliative care. Educational content emphasizes five categories including; the principles of palliative care, physical care, communication, ethics and psychosociocultural care. This curriculum used different methods for teaching and evaluating of students.

This curriculum emphasized the various aspect of the nursing palliative care with a review of the literature. Due to the need of nurses to palliative care such educational programs is necessary.