This is the fourth in a series on this blog: “Looking Back, Looking Forward: Our Legacy in Improving End-of-Life and Serious Illness Care.”
In the late 1990s there was a growing body of evidence that patients and families facing serious or terminal illness often did not receive quality care. Deficits were apparent in managing pain and other symptoms as well as providing psychosocial and spiritual care.
Researchers at City of Hope outside Los Angeles responded to this need, recognizing that nurses are extraordinarily influential health care professionals and central to improving patient care.
With support from Archstone Foundation, the City of Hope team expanded its End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) project to provide training for nurses in palliative care. An early mantra for the ELNEC team was “Nurses can’t practice what they don’t know.” If nurses were to provide better care, in other words, training would be necessary.
The ELNEC project has focused on some of the most vulnerable populations, training nurses in public hospitals, those caring for veterans, and developing ELNEC curricula for geriatrics, pediatrics and other areas of special need. The Foundation’s support was essential, planting many early seeds that have yielded great returns.
Since the 2005 grant, the ELNEC project has had global impact. The first courses, taught in California, charted a path: By the end of last year, ELNEC had prepared more than 40,000 people to train 1.4 million other clinicians in all 50 states and 100 countries. The initial effort to reach nursing schools in California has become a national model, and now more than 700 nursing schools are using the curriculum to train the future nursing workforce.
The ELNEC project exemplifies the importance of the new effort by Archstone Foundation to focus its strategies on Teams, Training, and Technology. Nurses are essential members of interdisciplinary teams providing patient and family-centered care. Training is the key ingredient to success. And technologies such as virtual learning and telehealth for patients harness the latest advances to prepare clinicians to deliver quality care.
