Conocimientos en cuidados paliativos del alumnado de enfermería de la Universitat de Valencia.

Resumen

Palliative care is fundamental to nurses; we need specific knowledge, which must be acquired during their university education. Palliative Care Quiz for Nurses (PCQN), used in other studies, allows us to determine nurses’ level of knowledge in the field of palliative care. Objectives: Determine the level of knowledge about palliative care in nursing students at our college, serving this study as a pilot study for the validation of the Spanish version of PCQN in this population. Material and methods: Descriptive cross sectional study; data were collected in June 2015, with a form created with Google form technology and distributed by e-mail. Descriptive analysis and nonparametric comparison of means tests were performed to data-analysis. Results: 119 students, 23 men and 96 women, with an average age of 25,38 years, participated in the study. 21% of them developed stages in palliative care units and 12,6% received additional training in the field of palliative care. The results show an average 42,10% of correct answers. Only significant differences were found in the percentage of wrong answers when analyzing results according to their sex, but not significant differences were found when analyzing by the fact of performing practices in palliative care units or receiving additional training. Discussion: Studies developed in Canada and the US using the original version of the PCQN show higher percentages of correct answers Difficulties of understanding in some items have been reported, which will make us change the wording for future usages of the questionnaire. Conclusions: Students of our College have shown to have inadequate knowledge about basic aspects of palliative care, so we would need to review the knowledges related to palliative care that they receive.