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Palliative care and psychology education needs in nursing courses: A focus group study among Italian undergraduates
Journal Title: PSICOLOGIA DELLA SALUTE 
Author/s: Ines Testoni, Marina Bottacin, Belinda Claudia Fortuna, Adriano Zamperini, Gaia Luisa Marinoni, Guido Biasco 
Year:  2019 Issue: 2 Language: English 
Pages:  20 Pg. 80-99 FullText PDF:  281 KB
DOI:  10.3280/PDS2019-002004
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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

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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

   

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