AACN AWARDED GRANT TO PLAN NURSING
CURRICULA TO
ENHANCE END-OF-LIFE CARE
WASHINGTON, D.C., May 16, 1997 --
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has awarded a grant of
$35,712 to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing
(AACN) to support strategy meetings toward development of
curricula and other tools to heighten nurses' abilities
to deliver essential end-of-life care.
The grant provides funding for a two-day
roundtable of invited experts from academic and clinical
settings who will identify crucial issues and content areas
that are key to preparing nurse clinicians who can appropriately
address end-of-life care and aid decisionmaking for dying
patients and their families. A date for the roundtable meeting,
to be held in Washington, D.C., will be announced.
Based in Princeton, N.J., the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation is the nation's largest philanthropy
devoted exclusively to health and health care.
"We are pleased to have this opportunity
to take a first step in developing pertinent curricula around
issues so fundamentally central, perhaps the most meaningful,
in an individual's health care," says AACN President Carole
A. Anderson, PhD, RN, FAAN. "Nurses spend more time with
patients and their families than do any other health professionals
and are in the most immediate position to provide care,
comfort, and counsel at the end of life when critical decisions
must be reached and compassionate and often highly specialized
care provided."
"The range of nursing experts to be
invited to this important gathering --representing such
areas as pain management, palliative care, and care involving
major sources of morbidity, such as AIDS, cancer, and kidney
disease -- illustrates the complexity of care and concerns
that nurses must address in responding comprehensively and
effectively to end-of-life needs of patients and family
members," Dr. Anderson explains.
The roundtable will be the first stage in
a two-stage process. A statement of recommended competencies
for end-of-life care by the professional nurse, as well
as specific guidelines for undergraduate and graduate curricula,
will be drafted from presentations at the roundtable meeting.
The curriculum model will be the basis for the second stage
of the process -- development of Internet and other on-line
tools to make educational materials available to the widest
possible number of nursing students and practicing nurses.
Roundtable participants will be asked to
consider an array of ethical, legal, and other concerns
surrounding care near the end of life, among them:
- communication between health
care professionals and patients, including advance directives
and "do not resuscitate" orders;
- the appropriateness of high-technology
interventions;
- the roles and responsibilities
of interdisciplinary team members; and
- management of pain and prolonged suffering
in intensive-care patients or in patients who are in coma.
Experts at the AACN roundtable also will
address the understanding of death in different cultures,
underlying philosophies of hospice care, and religious rituals
that ease transition from life to death.
In addition, participants will develop a
plan to influence the national licensing exam for registered
nurses to test for end-of-life competencies and will recommend
strategies for interdisciplinary education in end-of-life
care.
The American Association of Colleges
of Nursing is the national voice for university and four-year-college
education programs in nursing. Representing more than 580
member schools of nursing at public and private institutions
nationwide, AACN's educational, research, governmental advocacy,
data collection, publications, and other programs work to
establish quality standards for bachelor's- and graduate-degree
nursing education, assist deans and directors to implement
those standards, influence the nursing profession to improve
health care, and promote public support of baccalaureate
and graduate nursing education, research, and practice.
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CONTACT: Robert Rosseter
(202) 463-6930, x231
rrosseter@aacn.nche.edu
