Redesign of Clinical Practicum for End of Life Care with Integrated Perspectives

Abstract

With the cycling of nursing research, theory, practice, education, and policy making, nursing knowledge has been developed and disseminated. A clinical practicum is a good way to deliver nursing knowledge. Also an area of end-of-life (EOL) care is a good field to integrate nursing knowledge with different perspectives and multiple ways of knowing. The purposes of this paper were 1) to describe nursing knowledge and EOL with an integrated view, 2) to critique the current phenomenon of the field of EOL, and 3) to propose a redesign of the clinical practicum in EOL care. An integrative review was performed as the method of the study. The results showed that the reflection of nursing knowledge from different perspectives regarding EOL may help the nursing discipline develop various nursing knowledge, practice, education, and research. However, this paper shows that recent education is more focused on empirical knowledge, problem-solving approaches with a totality paradigm, and didactic teaching-learning methods. For redesigning the clinical practicum, it is necessary to reestablish a caring relationship between nursing instructors and nursing students. In terms of the teaching-learning process, the human-becoming teaching-learning process is recommended over the nurse-becoming process.