Appraisal of the Graduate End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium Training Program.

Background: Advanced practice nurses (APNs) are crucial in the provision of quality end-oflife care. However, little attention is devoted to palliative care in most graduate nursing curricula, leaving advanced practice nurses poorly prepared to meet the needs of those approaching the end of their lives.

Objective: The purpose of the graduate version of the End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC-Graduate) Training Program is to provide nursing faculty with the knowledge and materials necessary to include palliative care throughout the graduate nursing curriculum.

Evaluation of end-of-life nursing education for continuing education and clinical staff development educators.

This article presents data from the 1-year follow-up of the three conferences targeted toward continuing education (CE) providers and staff development (SD) educators and reviews the train-the-trainer model used in disseminating the End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) curriculum. The analysis has implications for educators to promote improved end-of-life (EOL) care in their own institutions.

Evaluation of the End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium undergraduate faculty training program.

Background: Previous research has demonstrated that nursing education has not prepared nurses to provide optimum end-of-life (EOL) care; and yet, care of patients at the EOL is contingent on adequate preparation of nurses. To date, there has not been a unified or organized effort to broadly address the preparation of nurses in EOL care.

Objective: The purpose of the End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC), a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded project (2000-2004), was to develop and implement a comprehensive national effort to improve EOL care by nurses through a joint collaboration between the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) and the City of Hope Cancer Center.

Writing Across the Curriculum: using Healthy People 2010 and the DHHS Secretary's Award for Innovations in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.

The authors detail a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) exercise that combines the Department of Health and Human Services' Secretary's Award for Innovations in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention (Secretary's Award) and the DHHS document Healthy People 2010. The authors discuss the writing competition as a way to encourage innovative problem solving and provide curricular instructions for using Healthy People 2010 and the Secretary's Award as a WAC exercise.

Ethical and legal issues in end-of-life care: content of the End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium curriculum and teaching strategies.

The End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) is a train-the-trainer educational program to help nursing faculty integrate care of dying patients and their families in the nursing curriculum. This article presents techniques derived from the ELNEC project regarding teaching the ethics module and the key content areas for developing ethical decision-making skills in end-of-life care. Competent end-of-life nursing care begins with an understanding of ethics and the potential affect on care of dying patients and their families.

Strategies for teaching loss, grief, and bereavement.

Teaching loss, grief, and bereavement to nursing students should be an interactive process to stimulate critical thinking and address the affective domain of learning. Lecture as a teaching methodology may be the easiest to prepare and deliver; however, used alone, it is ineffective in identifying perceptions, fears, and issues related to dying and death. Personal and professional experiences of loss, grief, and bereavement are central to student's learning of effective and compassionate care of the dying patient and their family.