Over 470 Nursing Schools Across the Nation are Using the ELNEC Undergraduate/New Graduate Online Curriculum:Is Your School One of Them?

Since the End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) launched its online, interactive ELNEC- Undergraduate Curriculum in January 2017, over 470 nursing schools have enrolled and over 42,,000 students have been educated in primary palliative care. With the help of the curriculum, these students are prepared to care for seriously ill patients and their families in whatever clinical setting they chose.  If your school is not on the ELNEC Hall of Fame Poster on the ELNEC website, why not? The curriculum is an easy way to ensure that your students are meeting the 17 competencies in primary palliative care that are in the AACN CARES (2016) document.

Here are some creative strategies to avoid barriers that, according to some of you, are preventing adoption of the curriculum:

"We cannot ask students to take on an additional $29 expense."  We are now able to make available for purchase the 12-month access to the online curriculum in your school's bookstore!  This is a big help for public institutions that cannot ask students to pay for materials out of their pockets.  Now students can use their financial aid package to pay for the curriculum and do not have to incur an additional personal expense for their education.

"Our faculty do not have the expertise or the time to include primary palliative care content in our already saturated curriculum." The online curriculum is comprised of six one-hour modules that students complete on their own time, usually as an assignment. There is no requirement that faculty have expertise in palliative care to assign the modules and all modules can be easily integrated into most any nursing clinical courses from sophomore year on. We have designed faculty supplemental materials for those who would like to add discussion in class or online. These materials are available to all schools using the curriculum at no cost.

"We will wait a year or two when we revise our curriculum to consider this."  Preparing your students to care for seriously ill patients is part of what every nursing course is about. There is no need to make changes to objectives or course content to incorporate the modules into nursing courses. The objectives for each module are written to be easily matched to objectives in most all clinical courses.

What are you waiting for? Enroll your students for the upcoming 2020-2021 academic year and see YOUR school's name on the ELNEC-Undergraduate Hall of Fame poster!

For more information about ELNEC Undergraduate/New Graduate,  contact elnec@coh.org.