Background: Deficiencies in end-of-life education may explain nursing students' reports of
feeling anxious and unqualified to care for dying patients. A volunteer Palliative Care Companion
program was developed to provide undergraduate nursing students with an experiential
learning opportunity by spending time with dying patients and their families.
Objective: To evaluate the impact of the Palliative Care Companion program on nursing
students' knowledge, attitudes, and concerns about providing palliative care, and to describe
companion students' volunteer activities.
Design: Quasiexperimental controlled pretest-posttest design.
Setting/subjects: Fifty-two undergraduate nursing students (32 companion students, 20 controls)
at a midwestern U.S. university with an affiliated hospital-based palliative care service.
Measurements: All participants completed the Palliative Care Quiz for Nurses, Attitudes
Toward Palliative Care, and Concern About Caring for Dying Patients questionnaires at the
beginning and end of the semester. Companion subjects also kept a journal describing their
palliative care experiences.
Results: Attitude scores were not analyzed because of poor internal consistency of the questionnaire.
Changes in scores on knowledge items did not reach significance. Concern scores
decreased significantly from pretest to posttest in the companion group. After adjusting for
pretest concern score, there was a trend toward lower concern score in the companion group
compared to controls (p = 0.07). Companion students' journals described activities including
visiting patients, viewing end-of-life videos, attending educational and public lectures, independent
reading, and making bereavement phone calls to family members.
Conclusions: The Palliative Care Companion program did not produce significant improvements
in knowledge and concerns compared to controls, but companion students described
their participation as a meaningful learning experience.
