Ms Anny Byrne1, Ms Carol Barbeler1
1West Gippsland Healthcare Group, Warragul, Australia
Biography:
Anny’s career as a registered nurse spans 40 years with over 20 years’ experience in cancer and palliative care settings. Anny has experience in successful project development, implementation and evaluation in the cancer and palliative care across acute, primary care and community health settings. Anny is currently the Manager of the Gippsland Regional Palliative Care Consortium (GRPCC)
Abstract:
Background:
Access to skilled palliative care professionals is fundamental to ensuring quality end-of-life care, yet regional and rural areas continue to face workforce challenges. Confidence is a key element of competence in palliative care nursing, particularly for clinicians transitioning into specialist roles. The Gippsland Regional Palliative Care Consortium (GRPCC) in partnership with Palliative Care South East (PCSE) and Australian College of Nursing (ACN) developed the Transition to Specialist Palliative Care (TSP) program to build skills, capability, confidence, and retention of regional nurses in palliative care. A Skills Matrix (SM) was developed to measure participant’s confidence pre– and post-program.
Aims:
To determine whether participation in the TSP program improved regional nurses’ confidence across three core palliative care domains on the SM; (1) communication, (2) symptom assessment and management of a person receiving palliative care, and (3) care of the dying person.
Methods:
41 nurses completed the TSP; 34 completed the SM pre- and post TSP rating their confidence in each domain using a proficiency scale from 1 = No knowledge, through to 5 = Can teach others. The scale reflected Benner’s Novice to Expert Framework. A descriptive analysis of mean pre-post TSP confidence scores was undertaken.
Results:
Overall, participants’ mean confidence scores increased across all three domains: from 3.5-pre to 3.9 -post. The largest increase in mean scores were in the symptom assessment and management domain 3.45 pre and 3.86 post; followed by the communication domain, 3.54-pre and 3.95-post; and finally, the care of the dying person domain; 3.58-pre and 3.96-post.
Conclusions:
The Skills Matrix provided measurable evidence of growth in confidence following the TSP program. This simple evaluation tool can be embedded in clinical education, capability frameworks and used for workforce education planning and development to strengthen regional workforce capacity in palliative care services.
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