The impact of end-of-life curriculum content on the attitudes of associate degree nursing students toward death and care of the dying 12

Because end-of-life care competes with other nursing content for a place in the curriculum, nurse educators are challenged to select effective teaching strategies to prepare graduates to care for dying patients. An elective course using the End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium curriculum was compared with a 3-hour lecture embedded in a larger medical–surgical course. Results suggested that both content-delivery methods positively impacted the attitude of students toward death and care of the dying to some extent; however, significant positive changes were noted in both intervention groups and in the control group that viewed the film Wit.