Under the current medical system, a terminal patient and his/her family who are neglected inevitably face various aspects of crises including not only physical, but also psychological, social, economic, spiritual and legal problems.
Nurses often look after many terminal patents with these types of complicated problems. Therefore, educating the nurses who will take care of such patents would greatly reduce stress so the patents end could their lives in peace and without losing their dignity.
This research is a quasi experimental study of nonequivalent control group. A pretest-posttest design where a basic education program is developed for nurses, who frequently treat terminal patents, to understand the importance of the role of hospice and to apply their understandings to treat terminal cancer patents.
A sample of the nurses were taken from those who were working in general wards at two general hospitals in Seoul during October, 2003 2003. The study was composed of 46 experimental group and 43 control group.
A basic hospice education program was developed by taking emphasized and overlapping parts from advanced practice hospice nurses education course, short-term education course, an extensive literature survey and by consulting three professionals as well.
With the group of 5 professors with vast experiences in oncolgy, 5 nursing administrator, 3 nursing practitioner, the tentative first version of the program was developed and reviewed. Afterwards, by utilizing person to person interviews with 2 head nurses experienced with terminal patients, 1 nurse in charge of hospice, 1 nurse on the contents of the program, and a person to person rating on the educating medium by a nurse were performed. The final version of a basic education program was developed after the second revision.
The hospice basic education program consists of introduction to hospice, hospice and commucation, management of pain for terminal cancer patients, physical management for terminal cancer patients, soco-psycological caring of terminal cancer patients and management of death and separation. Total education time was four hours organized into 50 minutes of instruction and 10 minutes of break. Powerpoint software was used as the education medium.
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