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Record W4415616364 · doi:10.1186/s12904-025-01913-0

The effect of a Finnish national palliative care specialisation education on nurse's palliative care competence: A pretest-posttest study

2025· article· en· W4415616364 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Maarit Lähteenmäki, Minna Koskimäki, Mervi Roos, Virpi Sulosaari, Minna Hökkä

Bibliographic record

VenueBMC Palliative Care · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicPalliative Care and End-of-Life Issues
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPalliative careCompetence (human resources)Pain medicineHealth careMEDLINE

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

BACKGROUND: Nurses play an important role in caring for patients in palliative care and they need sufficient palliative care competence. Additionally, the need for palliative care is increasing. Therefore, palliative care and end-of-life care is one of the fields where nurses' specialisation education is needed the most. The aim of this study was to assess the effect of postgraduate specialist education on nurses' palliative care competence and the association between participants' age or work experiences and changes in their palliative care competencies. METHODS: The data were collected through electronic surveys at the beginning and at the end of specialisation education in 17 universities of applied sciences in Finland. The survey was conducted using the Nurses' Core Competence in Palliative Care (NCPC) instrument. The survey response rate was 89% (pre-training) and 69% (post training). Of 286 nurses, 143 completed both the pre- and post-survey. The data were analysed using nonparametric tests. The level of statistical significance was set at p ≤ 0.05. RESULTS: After the education participants' self-assessed core competencies in palliative care increased compared to before the education, indicating that their knowledge and skills increased in all five domains. Knowledge in Symptom Management, Systematic Use of the Edmonton Symptom Assessment System (ESAS), Teamwork Skills and Interpersonal Skills increased statistically significantly (P < 0.001). Likewise, Life Closure Skills increased statistically significantly (P = 0.044) after the education. Some associations were found, those who had five years or less of work experience in palliative care or end-of-life care reported a greater increase in Interpersonal Skills compared to those with more than ten years of work experience (P = 0.002). Also, those aged 40 or younger reported a greater increase in Interpersonal Skills than those aged 41-50 (P = 0.017). CONCLUSION: This study shows that palliative care specialist education increased nurses' palliative care competence. No statistical association was found between work experience in healthcare and changes in competence; the competence of all participants increased during the education. Palliative care specialist education improves nurses' self-assessed competence in palliative care and may indirectly improve the quality of palliative care.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.169
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.068
GPT teacher head0.437
Teacher spread0.369 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

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