Impact of a Palliative Care Course on Pre-Registration Nursing Students’ Palliative Care Knowledge

In resource-poor settings some preregistration nursing curricula, do not include any palliative care content, and practising nurses, both newly graduated and student nurses have limited knowledge about palliative care. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of a palliative care course on Cameroonian preregistration nursing students’ palliative care knowledge. The study employed a longitudinal quasi-experimental pretest/posttest design. A 30 hours classroom based palliative care course, underpinned by the experiential learning theory was delivered to second and third year nursing students in a University in Cameroon. An evaluation of the impact of the course on students’ palliative care knowledge was conducted via a pretest/posttest survey. Data was analysed using both descriptive and inferential statistics. The study revealed very poor palliative care knowledge among preregistration nursing students, with a mean pretest score of 5.72/20 (Standard deviation of 2.54; Confidence Interval: 5.11-6.34). After the palliative care course there was a statistically significantly improvement in students’ overall palliative care knowledge, with a posttest score of 11.36 (SD= 2.03, CI 10.85-11.87). Demographic factors like students’ level in the nursing course and age were seen to be associated with students’ pre-course scores (P=0.002 and 0.027 respectively), but no demographic factor was implicated in the posttest score. There is therefore a need for curriculum revision to include palliative care content in the preregistration nurse training curricula of the pilot University.