Mrs Aliesha-Jane Fejgl1
1Eastern Health, Wantirna, Australia
Biography:
As a Nurse Manager of Wantirna Palliative Care Unit, Aliesha leads a dedicated team of healthcare professionals committed to delivering compassionate, patient-centred care to individuals in the greater eastern catchment of Melbourne. She brings her experience along the cancer care continuum into her passion for connected and conscious leadership. She ensures that the PCU not only meets the highest standards of patient centred, compassionate care but also fosters a supportive and collaborative environment for staff. Aliesha is currently focused on elevating her team and its achievements into the palliative care forums to celebrate the work that her team does every day.
Abstract:
Background:
Education in palliative care setting is often reactionary to events or planned with assumptions of needs rather than a formal needs analysis. Assessing nurse’s specialist palliative care skills and knowledge in an inpatient specialist palliative care unit as a group. Community palliative care consortium members have created a tool for self-assessment to identify education and improvements as a group.
Aims:
Review specialist palliative care skills for nurses and build a self-assessment survey tool for inpatient setting, by adapting the Gippsland Region Palliative Care Consortium, Community Specialist Palliative Care skills matrix, PD SMART.
Methods:
Connect with Gippsland Region Palliative Care Consortium and permission to adapt their tool. Using a PDSA cycle, adapt a MS Forms self-assessment tool for inpatient nurses. MS Forms platform assists with analysis of planning based off areas with lowest confidence reported from the groups
Results:
28 of 58 inpatient PCU nurses and 5 of 7 hospital-based consult service nurses completed the matrix. Staff had the option of completing this anonymously, or request print out of their self-assessment to assist their personal learning objectives. Allowing for bias of self-assessment, we formulated a plan for education in 2025 in areas of pain management, voluntary assisted dying and medication safety. Education was delivered in the PCU, utilising CNE, medical, pharmacy and senior nurse team members to deliver education in multiple formats such as in person, virtual and recorded videos.
Conclusions:
Focusing on 3 main points of education assisted the unit to tailor improvements to the group’s needs, rather than assumptions or reactionary needs. The matrix will assist in reviewing efficacy of education delivered and will also assist reassessment and future education focus without duplication. Future reviews into self-assessment bias would be beneficial to re-engineer future iterations, allowing psychologically safe critical reflection.