Urgent Appeal From Hospice Nurses for Pediatric Palliative Care Training and Community

Abstract

Porter et al 1 add valuable insights about the challenge that families and medical teams face when trying to find experienced pediatric hospice care professionals to care for children nearing the end of life. Forty-one southeastern US hospice nurses, with varying levels of comfort in pediatric care, participated in semistructured interviews. Most reported overwhelming discomfort in caring for children with serious illness, citing an immediate need for "any and all" pediatric content and training, access to pediatric palliative care (PPC) experts for immediate questions, and formation of a pediatric hospice nurse community to bolster resilience. 1 During a time when families are stressed and looking for guidance, hospice nurses report feeling uncomfortable, unprepared, and sometimes unwilling to care for children, describing the lack of education, training, knowledge, tools, and resources they have that would benefit the patient and family. Facets of pediatric care that nurses report difficulty with include communicating with the ill Open Access: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY License.

Increasing Access to Care: Designing a Blended Curriculum to Educate Adult Hospice Nurses in Caring for Pediatric Patients

“…Ways to improve community-based PHPC services include regular pediatric palliative care education and forming collaborative relationships between acute care PHPC providers and community-based teams [10][11][12][13]. In short, we need to foster communities of practice [14] with the knowledge and skills to provide palliative and hospice care to pediatric patients.…”

“…In short, we need to foster communities of practice [14] with the knowledge and skills to provide palliative and hospice care to pediatric patients. However, there are barriers to building the requisite knowledge and skills, including educational funding for hospice providers, time available for continuing education, confdence in caring for the pediatric population, availability of pediatric mentors or preceptors for clinical experience, and understanding of diferent payment models for PHPC including concurrent care [11,13,15,16]. Standard curriculums exist for education in the basics of pediatric palliative care, i.e., End-of-Life-Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC)-pediatric palliative care [17,18].…”