Neonatal palliative care: Assessing the nurses educational needs for terminally ill patients

Omar M Khraisat; Ahmad M Al-Bashaireh; Raed Khafajeh; Ola Alqudah

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0280081

Neonatal palliative care: Assessing the nurses educational needs for terminally ill patients

PLoS One. 2023 Jan 6;18(1):e0280081. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0280081. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Omar M Khraisat¹, Ahmad M Al-Bashaireh², Raed Khafajeh³, Ola Alqudah⁴

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Nursing, Al-Ahliyya Amman University, Amman, Jordan.
² Health Sciences Division-Nursing, Higher Colleges of Technology, Fujairah, United Arab Emirates.
³ Nursing Education Department, King Fahad Medical City, Riyadh, KSA.
⁴ Consultant-Family Medicine, King Fahad Medical City, Riyadh, KSA.

Abstract

Background: For terminally sick neonates and their families, it's crucial to provide holistic nursing care that incorporates both curative and palliative care as much as feasible. It is well known that the biggest obstacle to delivering palliative care for neonatal children is a lack of training for nurses. Aim: The aim of this research is to investigate the experiences of nurses who provide care for neonates who are terminally ill as well as their educational requirements for neonatal palliative care.

Method: A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted among 200 nurses working in a tertiary center providing care for terminally ill neonates in Saudi Arabia. Data was collected from using Neonatal Palliative Care Questionnaire (QNPC) from January 2021 to March 2021.

Results: Two hundred nurses were surveyed (the response rate was 79%). The mean age of the 158 participants was 35.67 (standard deviation (SD): 7.43), and the majority were female (151; 95.6%). The majority were bachelor's holders (119; 75.3%), with more than 5 years of experience in providing care for neonates (100; 63.3%). Most of the participants reported not receiving any education about palliative care (115; 72.8%). Nurses reported a moderate level of experience in all areas of neonatal palliative care. The total mean score of palliative care experiences of neonates was 3.42 (SD: 1.35). However, the majority of nurses reported little experience discussing the transition period to palliative care for neonates 2.95 (SD: 1.93), the discussion of code status (DNR) during terminal illness of neonates 3.11 (SD: 1.54) and spiritual support 2.90 (SD: 1.55).

Conclusion: The assessment of the fundamental skills of neonatal palliative care by nurses was insufficient. To enhance the quality of care, it is crucial to incorporate education on neonatal palliative care into programs for nursing staff development.

Copyright: © 2023 Khraisat et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Child
Cross-Sectional Studies
Female
Humans
Infant, Newborn
Male
Nursing Staff*
Palliative Care*
Surveys and Questionnaires
Terminally Ill

Grants and funding

This research was funded by King Fahad Medical City, Riyadh-Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (IRF19-655). The funders had no role in study design, data collection, and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The funder provided support in the form of salaries for authors [Khafajeh and Alqudah], but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.