Journal of Palliative Care & Medicine
Open Access

Research Article

Nurses' Knowledge and Practice toward Gynecologic Oncology Palliative Care

¹Department of Obstetrics and Gynecologic Nursing, Faculty of Nursing, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey

²Dean of Faculty of Health Science and Director of Nursing Services of MLP Care, Istinye University, Istanbul, Turkey

*Corresponding Author:

Fusun Terzioglu, PhD, RN
Dean of Faculty of Health Science and Director of Nursing Services of MLP Care
Istinye University, Istanbul, Turkey
Tel: +90-212-481-3688
E-mail: fterzioglu@istinye.edu.tr

Received date: July 05, 2017; Accepted date: July 27, 2017; Published date: July 31, 2017

Citation: Uslu-Sahan F, Terzioglu F (2017) Nurses’ Knowledge and Practice toward Gynecologic Oncology Palliative Care. J Palliat Care Med 7:315. doi:10.4172/2165-7386.1000315

Copyright: © 2017 Uslu-Sahan F, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Objectives: Gynecologic cancers are the second main reasons for morbidity in women following breast cancer in Turkey and globally. The majority of patients with gynecologic cancer experience recurrence and die despite aggressive treatment. Because of this, patients with gynecologic cancers remain an ideal population for palliative care. Nurses are an essential part of the palliative care team in providing high standards of care since they spend the longest time with patients. The aim of the study to assess knowledge, practice and opinions about barriers toward palliative care among nurses working in gynecologic oncology units.

Methods: The cross-sectional survey-based study was conducted nurses (N=65) working in six tertiary care hospitals’ gynecologic oncology units in Ankara Province in Turkey. For data collection a survey was used. The descriptive statistics were used in data analysis.

Results: It was determined that 52.3% of the nurses did not receive any knowledge regarding palliative care. The knowledge nurses received was mostly about communication skills (96.8%), pain management (96.8%) and symptom control (96.8%). It was found that 73.8% of the nurses did not talk about death with patients and their families. One of the most common barriers faced by nurses was opioid phobia experienced by patients (66.2%) and healthcare professionals (41.5%).

Conclusions The current study indicates the need for wider coverage of palliative care in the education of preservice and in-service nurses to increase their knowledge and therefore practice. This education needs to be comprehensive in covering the basic principles of palliative care and symptom management and it should be distributed throughout the different courses to discuss palliative care within different contexts, such as gynecologic oncology setting.

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