Palliative Care education through development of a web site

Paper

Thursday, July 12, 2007

This presentation is part of : End-of-Life Interventions

James Denman, RN, BSN, CNR, UCDMC, Sacramento, CA, USA, Rosa Asad, RN, CNR, University of California Davis Medical Center, Sacramento, CA, USA, and Bonnie Raingruber, RN, PhD, Center for Nursing Research and Center for Health and Human Services Research, University of California Davis and California State University, Sacramento, Sacramento, CA, USA.

Learning Objective #1: list two advantages of setting up a palliative care web site to expand knowledge in a hospital setting.
Learning Objective #2: access three web sites with palliative care resources and educational materials for nurses, patients and their families.

We have been working to expand knowledge of the need for palliative care for a greater number of patients not just the terminally ill. We have been doing this through meeting with an interdisciplinary group of hospital personal interested in the topic. This group includes nurses from adult, pediatric and neonate units at our hospital, physicians on the pain service, chaplaincy services, an ICU nurse manager, a pharmacist, hospice nurses, a speech pathologist, a clinical social worker, a bioethics professor, a nursing educator, and a nursing researcher.

We began with a literature review on the topic and researched palliative care services available in other hospitals in the region.

The web site we designed provides resources to nurses, physicians, co-workers, patients and their families who seek more information about palliative care topics. It provides links to hospital, regional, national, and international web sites.

Findings:
We presented a workshop introducing the Palliative Care concept. One of the sessions focused on how to use the Palliative Care web site. Returned scores from an 11-question Likert Scale found 86% (24/28) of the participants weren’t aware of the web site before the seminar. Answering the statement, “I can apply information from the presentation in my practice” 96% (28/29) of the participants agreed or strongly agreed. Asking the participants: “With information I learned from this presentation I will be better able to care for my patients” 83% (24/29) strongly agreed or agreed. When asked about referring patients to the Palliative care web site 86% (25/29) of participants agreed or strongly agreed doing so would improve patient satisfaction.

Implications:
Designing a Palliative Care web site is a practical and efficient way to educate co-workers and community about available resources. It also can demonstrate the efficacy of implementing palliation during earlier stages of a patients’ hospitalization.

See more of End-of-Life Interventions
See more of The 18th International Nursing Research Congress Focusing on Evidence-Based Practice (11 -- 14 July, 2007)