Congress Abstracts 2006

51

DISSEMINATING END-OF-LIFE EDUCATION TO ONCOLOGY NURSES USING THE ELNEC-ONCOLOGY CURRICULUM. Michelle Gabriel, RN, MS, OCN^®, ACHPN, VA Palo Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto, CA; and Agnes Wong, RN, MS, CNS, OCN^®, Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, San Francisco, CA.

Palliative care and end-of-life issues continue to be of critical importance for oncology patients and their families. Until recently, less focus had been placed on providing nurses with the skills needed to practice comprehensive end-of-life care. With societal and professional recognition of the importance of these skills, initiatives such as the End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) have been established to address the need to educate nurses in providing quality end-of-life care to patients and their families.

The purpose of this project was to utilize different methods to educate oncology nurses on end-of-life issues using the oncology curriculum of ELNEC, thereby meeting ELNEC's goal to "disseminate palliative care education through (the) local ONS chapter to improve care of cancer patients and their families."

Two approaches were utilized as a means of disseminating palliative care education to the San Francisco Bay Area ONS chapter membership. The first approach was a palliative care column, based on individual ELNEC modules, and was published as a regular feature in the local and neighboring chapter newsletters. The second approach was a palliative care dinner series, which met every three to four months, with each dinner's lecture based on one of the ELNEC modules.

Both of these educational approaches are ongoing, which will allow for the remaining ELNEC modules to be presented. At the end of this year, questions regarding the utility and significance of these approaches will be included in the annual membership survey. Evaluations are collected at the end of each dinner lecture and look at the usefulness of the information and the ability of the attendee to bring back the information to his/her place of work. The responses to date have been positive, and there is a regular core group of attendees to these lectures.

Through these different approaches, oncology nurses from the San Francisco chapter and the Bay Area have increased access to end-of-life education. These endeavors have met the main goal of the ELNEC-oncology program and can be used by other local chapters as a way to increase palliative care education among oncology nurses.