M. Sc. Nursing (Oncology), Bhagwan Mahaveer Cancer Hospital and Research Centre, College of Nursing, JLN Marg, Jaipur
Online published on 11 October, 2017.
Palliative care is a health care specialty that is both a philosophy of care and an organized, highly structured system for delivering care to persons with life-threatening or debilitating illness from diagnosis till death and then into bereavement care for the family. Palliative care improves health care quality in three domains: the relief of physical and emotional suffering; improvement and strengthening of the process of patient-physician communication and decision making; and assurance of coordinated continuity of care across multiple healthcare settings-hospitals, home, hospices, and long-term care.
To assess the level of knowledge of staff nurses regarding palliative care.
To develop and validate the planned teaching program (PTP).
To assess the effectiveness of PTP.
An evaluative research approach was adapted in order to assess the knowledge about Palliative care among staff nurses in selected hospitals at Jaipur. A quasi-experimental design with one group pre-test post-test design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of PTP for the present study. The content validity of tool and PTP was established by five experts in the field of nursing. The plan of data analysis includes both descriptive and inferential statistics.
The findings of the study reveal that the mean differences of the pre-test and post-test which is statistically significant at 0.05 levels. It indicates a significant difference and effectiveness of PTP in terms of knowledge gain by staff nurses. Hence this shows that PTP was effective in increasing the knowledge level of the samples regarding Palliative care.
The whole study was cost-effective, simple, and carried out in an acceptable way to assess the level of knowledge on Palliative care among staff nurses. They had inadequate knowledge regarding Palliative care; so I felt the need to develop a PTP to enhance the knowledge on Palliative care.
Palliative Care, Planned Teaching Program, Staff Nurses
