Effect of end-of-life care education on the attitudes of nurses in infants’ and children’s wards

BACKGROUND: Infants palliative care becomes an important aspect of nursing when providing welfare and promoting children's life quality are the objectives of care. The number of children with life threatening diseases has increased alongside the developments in technology and medical treatment in medicine. It is a pure fact that our attitudes are related to our behaviors and performances. This research was conducted with the aim of assessing the effect of intensive course of children's palliative care on the attitudes of children and infants' nurses in Isfahan University of Medical Sciences. METHODS: This was a quasi-experimental, two-group and two-stage study in which 56 nurses working at Infants’ and children’s wards who met inclusion criteria were divided into experiment and control groups. The participants of experiment group attended in the infants' palliative care training course which lasted for 3 weeks. A reliable and already validated questionnaire of Infants and Children Wards Nurses' Attitudes Regarding the Dying Children was used before and after training. RESULTS: There was no significant difference between the two groups regarding demographic characteristics, except for marital status which was found the study findings were not confounded by it. There was a significant difference between mean test and re-test scores in the experiment group and also between the mean scores of control and experiment groups after training. There was no significant difference between mean scores before and after training in the control group. CONCLUSIONS: End-of-life children care is one of the issues in modern medicine which has not gained a definite status in Iran. It is hoped that nurses would be the forerunners of this modern science in Iran.