The Education in Fundamentals of Palliative Care (EFPC) program for student and novice nurses: effective and sustainable implementation of an evidence-based palliative care intervention.

Palliative care is important because it optimizes the quality of life of patients and their families. Several barriers hinder the implementation of evidence based palliative care (EBPC) such as nurses’ unfamiliarity with guidelines or use of them, capabilities to face dying patients, reduced self-efficacy and moral distress. To enhance nurses’ ability to deliver EBPC, we implement and evaluate an educational intervention (the EFPC program), where we train student and novice nurses in practice oriented, evidence based palliative care skills and competencies and to effectively adopt self-leadership into routine practice.

The objective of this project is to explore the feasibility of the EFPC intervention along with the potential impact on nurse reported outcomes. Methods include a process evaluation, a phenomenological and a mixed methods study. Overall project results include a consolidation plan for the effective and sustainable use of EBPC, peer-reviewed papers and a user manual.