Hospice palliative care education for nursing students, nurses, and advanced nursing practitioners

The aim of hospice palliative education care is to train nurses in hospice philosophy, terminal care skills, nursing care competencies, and professional reliability. Student nurses, staff nurses, and advanced practice nurses must be taught through a proper sequence, from novice to expert. Working together with patients and their families, nurses can educate and care for the physical, social and spiritual needs of terminally ill patients. Currently, problems faced in hospice palliative care education include: 1. The lack of a systematic plan focusing on hospice palliative care and terminal care in nursing schools; 2. The absence of comfort care, communications, ethics, and other relevant issues in extant education and training; 3. The limited number of institutes that currently provide in-service training; 4. The shortage of teachers proficient in both hospice care knowledge and practice; and 5. The current overdependence on traditional nursing education models, which hinders student nurse originality and delays staff nurse growth. Faced with the present issues, self-reflection, localization, and multiple teaching strategies should be the critical developmental directions of hospice palliative education. In order to improve terminal care quality, it is also important to integrate practice, education, and research in order to train more hospice palliative nurses.