Despite palliative care has become increasingly important, in some countries including Ita-ly, the university nursing courses do not adequately prepare students to manage the relation-ship with dying persons. This study aims at investigating the perceived competence in end-of-life care among undergraduates taking nursing courses. Adopting a qualitative approach, the study involved 37 nursing undergraduates in their third year of study, in 4 places offering de-gree courses in nursing at a Northern Italy University. The text of their discussion was literally transcribed and partially lemmatized, then the corpora were processed with Atlas-t with the-matic analysis on the basis of the EACP recommendations. This study found that death is per-ceived as total nonsense and religion as a mere instrument to alleviate the suffering of the dy-ing and their relatives. However, the students felt that they are not prepared to face and manage such themes. As indicated by the EACP recommendations, a specific curriculum of death edu-cation, elements of palliative care, psychology and religion, communication skills and self-reflection are indicated where necessary. Furthermore, the need for a supervisor capable of utilizing narrative medicine as support is underlined.
Keywords: University nursing courses, palliative care, EACP recommendations, religion, death education, narrative medicine
Ines Testoni, Marina Bottacin, Belinda Claudia Fortuna, Adriano Zamperini, Gaia Luisa Marinoni, Guido Biasco, Palliative care and psychology education needs in nursing courses: A focus group study among Italian undergraduates in "PSICOLOGIA DELLA SALUTE" 2/2019, pp. 80-99, DOI:10.3280/PDS2019-002004