End-of-life care teaching strategies in prelicensure nursing education: An integrative review

In order to provide appropriate end-of-life care, prelicensure nursing students need adequate education prior to entering professional nursing practice. This integrative literature review presents characteristics of end-of-life teaching strategies and their impact on student educational outcomes. Databases, reference lists, and related citations were explored using specific inclusion and exclusion criteria, resulting in 14 articles for review. The most commonly implemented teaching strategies were found to be in-class activities or entire courses dedicated to palliative or end-of-life care. Lecture/didactic strategies were used most often. All teaching strategies resulted in positive learning outcomes for attitude, knowledge, self-confidence/self-efficacy, and appreciation/awareness of end-of-life care. Recommendations for future research are proposed, especially for improvement of research study design, measurement of students' learning outcomes rather than attitudes and opinions, and assessment of patient outcomes within education research.