Recent research has tied nurses’ insufficient knowledge of palliative care to underutilization of those services in various countries worldwide.
Researchers from the School of Nursing at Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Guang’an Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine’s director office recently performed a systematic review of various studies throughout the globe that examined nurses’ knowledge of palliative care.
“It can be seen that nurses’ mastery of palliative care knowledge is not sufficient,” researchers said in the BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care analysis. “It is recommended that relevant departments formulate and promote the implementation of targeted measures to improve the knowledge level of this population.”
The research spanned 40 studies across 10 databases in 12 countries from 2010 to 2021 that measured the level of understanding using the Palliative Care Quiz for Nursing (PCQN) scale.
Of the 22,980 nursing participants examined, the pooled mean score for their level of palliative care knowledge was 9.68 (95% CI: 9.40 to 9.96), the analysis found.
A score of less than 10 on the PCQN scale indicated a “low/insufficient knowledge” of palliative care, compared to those above this threshold who demonstrated higher comprehension of these services.
The findings illustrate the crucial role nurses can play when it comes to patients’ awareness, access and quality of palliative care services, according to the researchers.
“Lack of knowledge about palliative care is one of the most common reasons for hindering the delivery of high-quality palliative care,” the researchers stated. “Nurses play a major role in providing palliative care, and the degree of their mastery of this knowledge is crucial to whether they can effectively deliver the ideal palliative care. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the level of palliative care knowledge in this population.”
