Death Education: What Should Student Children’s Nurses be Taught?

Abstract

Children's nursing has developed rapidly over the last 50 years and continues to be a dynamic process. In many respects children's nursing educators, together with their practice colleagues, have been central to these developments. There is concordance that all children have the right to the highest standards of care and this especially applies to the small numbers who die; however, the management of dying children continues to challenge all involved. The reasons for this may relate in part to deficiencies in death education for student children's nurses. This paper reports on a qualitative study that explored delivery of death education by a small number of UK children's nursing lecturers. The results and recommendations presented here may help to inform death education, and ultimately help to facilitate high-quality care for dying and bereaved children and their families.

‘Quality End of Life Care for All’ (QELCA): the national rollout of an end-of-life workforce development initiative

“…McCormack et al 13 suggest that practice development should focus on developing ‘person-centred cultures’, taking into account the impact of ‘human factors’ such as team relationships and morale on ‘clinical effectiveness and patient outcome’. Whittle14 suggests that death education should enable learners to confront their own mortality, and this theme runs parallel to theory and practice. QELCA involves learners engaging in emotional work, reflecting on participants’ fears and anxiety surrounding death, and their role in end-of-life care.…”

Storyboarding as an aid to learning about death in children’s nursing

“…However, there has been limited published research into the needs and education of health professionals who work with dying children (Papadatou, 1997;Rashotte et al, 1997;Kaunonen, 2000) with a particular focus on palliative care (Malloy et al, 2006;Reid, 2013). There has been very limited study of death education for children's nursing students (Whittle, 2002;Schreiner, 2009;Carson 2010) and Malloy et al (2006) found that nurse education did not prepare nurses for end of life care with children and families. This deficit provides children's nurse education with a significant challenge and opportunity to be innovative.…”