A two-year, $535,000 grant from the California Health Care Foundation will enable City of Hope’s Division of Nursing Research and Education to deliver much-needed palliative care education to nurses working in California’s 16 public hospitals.

This training course marks the latest addition to the End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) project, developed by Betty Ferrell, Ph.D., R.N., professor in the Division of Nursing Research and Education, to improve palliative care.

Betty Ferrell (Photo courtesy of the Archstone Foundation)

Palliative care is interdisciplinary care for people with serious diseases, and focuses on working with patients and their families to manage complex symptoms and to help them cope with the stress of illness. It aims to improve quality of life for patients and families.

“Since its inception in 2000, ELNEC has grown exponentially and now has a global reach,” said Ferrell, a leader in palliative care for more than three decades. Nursing researchers have both taken their program to other nations and delivered it close to home, customizing it to the care of specific patient populations such as aging adults and military veterans.

More than 13,000 nurses and health-care professionals from all 50 states and more than 70 countries have received this end-of-life training and returned to their communities to train 390,000 of their peers.

The new course in California will cover core nursing concepts in palliative care, including pain and symptom management, communication, cultural aspects of palliative care, ethics, bereavement and care during the final days and hours. It also will help prepare nurses to teach important palliative care concepts to their colleagues.

Additionally, it will focus on leadership skills and integrating palliative care into policy and practice at the nurses’ home hospitals.

The curriculum will address special issues within the public hospital setting, such as an increase of disadvantaged patients who may have delayed treatment and have more advanced disease because they lack insurance.

The ELNEC-For-Public Hospitals-Train-the-Trainer Course will be held Nov. 28 to 30 in Pasadena, Calif. Nurses attending the November workshop will receive work plans designed for their particular institution, as well as tools to assess the training’s effectiveness.

“Throughout the next two years, nurses attending this course also will receive additional mentoring and periodic site visits by ELNEC trainers,” added Rose Virani, R.N., M.H.A., O.C.N., senior research specialist in the Division of Nursing Research and Education and director for ELNEC projects.