What is a compassionate response in the emergency department? Learner evaluation of an End‐of‐Life Essentials online education module

Abstract

Objective To evaluate the End‐of‐Life Essentials education module ‘Emergency Department End‐of‐Life Care’ and explore learners' views on what constitutes a compassionate response in the ED. Methods The present study used a multi‐methods approach. Learners comprised a mix of nurses, doctors and allied health professionals. A quantitative pre‐post evaluation analysis of learners' (n = 959) knowledge, skills, attitude and confidence was conducted, along with a qualitative thematic content analysis on learner responses (n = 538) to the post‐evaluation question, ‘What is a compassionate response for you in the emergency department?’ Data were extracted for a 12‐month period, 6 May 2019 to 6 May 2020. Results Learners' post‐evaluation ranks of knowledge, skill, attitude and confidence were significantly higher than the pre‐evaluation ranks (P < 0.001). Emerging themes from the qualitative data were organised into three overarching categories: communication skills (e.g. listening and use of names), care discussion and provision (e.g. provide information and discuss care plans) and humanising healthcare (e.g. emotional support and empathy, taking the time, and offering kindness and comfort). Conclusion The ‘Emergency Department End‐of‐Life Care’ module had a significant positive impact on learners in relation to perceived knowledge, skill, attitude and confidence. This evaluation suggests that the End‐of‐Life Essentials ED module could be a useful online learning resource for health professionals.

“Holding back my own emotions”: Evaluation of an online education module in pediatric end-of-life care

“…This is consistent with evaluations undertaken on the Chronic Complex Illness module (Rawlings et al, 2020a) and the Emergency Department module (Rawlings et al, 2021). The qualitative results revealed two overarching themes of: "dealing with emotions" and "communicating effectively," with communication featured as a theme in earlier work (Rawlings et al, 2019b(Rawlings et al, , 2020a(Rawlings et al, , 2021. Excellent communication is vital to provision of good end-of-life care for children but is insufficient and/or lacking in many cases (Mu et al, 2019), and can be delayed until death is imminent (Marsac et al, 2018).…”

“…The EOLE project has so far carried out a range of data collection techniques to explore and describe changes in the perceived knowledge, skills, and behaviors of health professionals who engage with the online modules and resources (Rawlings et al,. 2020a(Rawlings et al,. , 2021.…”

“…This sample of learner professions mostly represented the proportion of healthcare professionals in Australian public hospitals (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2019), similar to previous studies by the authors (Rawlings et al,. 2020a(Rawlings et al,. , 2021.…”

“…As the death of an infant or child is relatively uncommon, health care professionals' end-of-life clinical skills are not often practiced, and clinicians can feel poorly trained and ill-prepared (Korzeniewska-Eksterowicz et al, 2013;Price et al, 2017). Dying in an acute care setting brings its own unique challenges, where fast-paced environments with a focus on curative care, may translate to clinicians' viewing dying as a failure (Rawlings et al,. 2021;Muskat et al, 2020).…”

Aotearoa New Zealand emergency medicine specialists on the provision of care at or near the end of life: A survey

“…12 The main purpose of this evidence-based guide is hearing and listening to what is important to patients and the families . [13][14][15] It helps staff elicit the person's views and preferences about their health and this is used to inform their goals of care.…”