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Background Final-year nursing students in Spain augmented the health care workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic. Purpose To understand the lived experience of nursing students who joined the health care workforce during the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak (March–May 2020). Method Qualitative content analysis of the reflective journals of 40 nursing students in Spain. Findings. The analysis identified four main themes: 1) Willingness to help; 2) Safety and protective measures: Impact and challenges; 3) Overwhelming experience: Becoming aware of the magnitude of the epidemic; and 4) Learning and growth. Discussion The wish to help, the sense of moral duty, and the opportunity to learn buffered the impact of the students' lived experience. Despite the challenges they faced, they saw their experiences as a source of personal and professional growth, and they felt reaffirmed in their choice of career. Promoting opportunities for reflection and implementing adequate support and training strategies is crucial for building a nursing workforce that is capable of responding to future health crises.

Background: The comprehensive assessment of needs in palliative care identifies where patients most want attention to guide clinical decisions that tailor care provision from their first encounters. Aim: To define how and what needs are identified by the comprehensive assessment of needs in the original peer-reviewed articles in the field of palliative care. Design: An integrative systematic review as outlined by Whittemore and Knafl. Quality appraisal performed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. Data sources: PubMed, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Web of Science databases searched through May 2019 and updated in July 2020. Results: Forty-nine articles met inclusion criteria for original articles in English or Spanish reporting comprehensive assessment of needs of adult patients receiving palliative care. The majority (41/49) of studies were moderate to high quality. Two themes were identified: (1) How a comprehensive assessment of needs should be carried out in palliative care, which reflected a preference to develop structured tools for assessment; (2) What needs of patients should be assessed in the comprehensive assessment of needs in palliative care, which conveyed a trend to assess beyond core domains – physical, psychological, social, spiritual – with information and practical most prevalent, but with substantial variation in specifying and classifying needs into domains. Conclusions: The assessment of needs in palliative care is comprehensive but lacks consensus on the needs and domains that should be assessed by the palliative care team. Future studies should better define what needs can be standardized into the assessment to improve process of care and patient satisfaction.

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IntroductionThe benefits of palliative care rely on how healthcare professionals assess patients’ needs in the initial encounter/s; crucial to the design of a personalised therapeutic plan. However, there is currently no evidence-based guideline to perform this needs assessment. We aim to design and evaluate a proactive and systematic method for the needs assessment using quality guidelines for developing complex interventions. This will involve patients, their relatives and healthcare professionals in all phases of the study and its communication to offer clinical practice a reliable approach to address the palliative needs of patients.Methods and analysisTo design and assess the feasibility of an evidence-based, proactive and systematic Multidimensional needs Assessment in Palliative care (MAP) as a semistructured clinical interview guide for initial palliative care encounter/s in patients with advanced cancer. This is a two-phase multisite project conducted over 36 months between May 2019 and May 2022. Phase I includes a systematic review, discussions with stakeholders and Delphi consensus. The evidence gathered from phase I will be the basis for the initial versions of the MAP, then submitted to Delphi consensus to develop a preliminary guide of the MAP for the training of clinicians in the feasibility phase. Phase II is a mixed-methods multicenter feasibility study that will assess the MAP’s acceptability, participation, practicality, adaptation and implementation. A nested qualitative study will purposively sample a subset of participants to add preliminary clues about the benefits and barriers of the MAP. The evidence gathered from phase II will build a MAP user guide and educational programme for use in clinical practice.Ethics and disseminationEthical approval for this study has been granted by the university research ethics committee where the study will be carried out (approval reference MED-2018-10). Dissemination will be informed by the results obtained and communication will occur throughout.