Study of the Effect That the Workshop to Promote the Conceptual Understanding of End-of-Life Care for Nurses in a Special Nursing Home for Elderly

Abstract

In this study we developed and implemented a workshop program for nurses providing end-of-life care in special nursing care homes, to improve the understanding of long-term, continuing processes from the admission till death. This study aimed to explore and identify the reaction of nurses to the matters included in the workshop, and also the changes in nursing practice after the workshop. For the reaction of nurses to the workshop, nurses were asked about understandability, usefulness, and practicability of the matters introduced in the workshop. After the workshop period, we conducted semi-structured interviews and analyzed the data qualitatively. Eighteen out of 19 nurses regarded ‘time division of each stage’ and ‘physical and mental characteristics of the elderly in each stage’ as useful and practicable knowledge. Further, after the workshop, we extracted the following three categories as central categories in the practice reported by nine nurses who had experience of end-of-life care: 《awareness as the process of end-of-life care》, 《development of nursing based on logical thinking》, and 《evaluation of how nursing in special nursing care homes is worthwhile》. The findings suggested that the matters included in the training are valid as conceptual knowledge in end-of-life care.