By Anthony Barich
National Reporter
The University of Notre Dame Australia’s School of Nursing in Fremantle has become the first university in WA to introduce a Palliative Care Major at undergraduate level.
While Curtin University has a weekly two hour palliative care lecture as part of its Nursing and Midwifery course and Edith Cowan University has post-graduate qualifications in palliative care at Masters and Graduate Diploma levels, UNDA is the first WA university to offer a full undergraduate course in palliative care. Murdoch University has no palliative care course or units.
The move is significant for the training of future WA health professionals in nursing.
UNDA’s course is the brainchild of St John of God Health Care’s Murdoch Hospice, which wanted to increase knowledge and awareness of palliative care in the community. UNDA also recently appointed Prof Jane Phillips as its chair of Palliative Care at its Sydney campus.
UNDA Fremantle’s Dean of Nursing, Prof Selma Alliex, said that palliative care is often misunderstood by students, and that “some see it as euthanasia with another name”.
“It is important to distinguish the difference between the two,” said Prof Alliex, who has been Dean of Nursing at UNDA for five years after two years as its Post-Graduate and Clinical Coordinator.
“Having considered the definitions, it is evident that the imperative to enlighten our students within a Catholic context solely rests with us. With this in mind, the School of Nursing has commenced the Bachelor of Nursing (Palliative Care Major),” she said.
Politicians who often lobby for euthanasia laws to provide an option for those that palliative care can’t help is based on a fallacy, she said, as there is nothing palliative care cannot help.
It is a “whole range of interventions that make the person’s end of life a peaceful, pain-free event. It’s not a cure, nor is it just one strategy”.
It involves pain management, keeping the patient in an environment conducive to a peaceful death of dignity, which, she said, is “such a relative term”. Her idea of dignity is to ensure the patient is kept clean and nourished with the family around them, ensuring that carers don’t cause them more pain. It encompasses mind, body and spiritual needs.
Central to the palliative care philosophy is balancing the patients and their families’ wishes and providing care using a digified approach, which, she said, is “a huge issue for nurses”.
She told The Record that it takes “a special kind of person” to work in palliative care, which is an “emotionally charged, traumatic area”.
“It’s not just looking at what patients are going through, it’s dealing with the impact on their family, which is a big component of caring,” she said.
Several students undertook a trial first-year course last year after a grant from the Queensland-based Palliative Care Curriculum for Undergraduate Students helped streamline the programme to tie into the clinical practicum, and will expand to about 10.
The grant enabled UNDA to hire a consultant from SJOGHC to identify pertinent palliative care resources that students can use in all Palliative Care units and to develop palliative care objectives for students to achieve in clinical areas.
This is so that when the students are assessed at the end of the practicum, UNDA can ensure they have achieved all they set out to achieve.
22 February will see the Major in Palliative Care start proper, with Semester 1’s theoretical unit focusing on nursing communications, using a software package related to palliative care to study case studies, treatment options and nursing interventions.
Semester 2 is a 200 hour practicum with students working for SilverChain hospice care.
The course’s second year will see students studying Pharmacology related to palliative care, including disease processes relating to terminal illnesses, in Semester 3, plus another 200 hour practicum at Royal Perth and Princess Margaret Hospitals’ palliative care wards.
In Semester 4, students will study palliative care components involving how people suffer from complex wounds and terminal illnesses.
Semester 5 in third year is a counselling unit relating to palliative care before a compulsory clinical component of 100 hours in Semester 6, where students can choose between acute, community or hospice care. General Nursing students can also choose this unit as an elective.
Prof Alliex said that the launch of the Palliative Care Major is a significant event for UNDA’s School of Nursing, which after 10 years has taken up “much soul searching and reflection to identify areas that we as a Catholic university can offer as an area of need”.