The NursEduPal@Euro approach to defining common European core palliative care competencies consisted of an iterative process starting in 2020 and ending in 2022. We explored the research question by interviewing a range of healthcare professionals in multidisciplinary palliative care teams in four European countries using the NGT method and by reviewing the available literature on the topic.
The results of the multi-site NGT were published as an Original Research Paper in The Journal of Palliative Care in April 2024. The paper is entitled ‘Core Palliative Care Competencies for Undergraduate Nursing Education: International Multisite Research Using Online Nominal Group Technique’.
For an overview of the resulting ten analytical themes, see the table below. You can read the full paper here.
The core palliative care competencies have the potential to make a difference to nursing education across Europe by providing guidance on how to integrate palliative care into curricula. Although nursing programmes may vary from country to country, these core competencies provide clarity about the palliative care knowledge, skills and attitudes that nurses need to provide palliative care.
The first step in integrating the competencies into nursing education is to raise awareness of, and familiarity with, the core competencies.
The core competencies can be used to:
• assess the extent to which the nursing curriculum includes the elements of the core competencies;
• guide educators in developing learning objectives that are aligned with the competencies;
• assess and evaluate student learning to determine whether they have achieved the palliative care competencies.
