Development of an evidence-informed education package for occupational therapists for palliative and end of life care: promoting occupational justice
Keywords:
Training, Staff Development, Professional Education, Palliative Care, End of lifeAbstract
Introduction: Death is inevitable, yet hospitals and health services continue to focus on life-sustaining practices despite clients presenting with clear decline related to life-limiting illness. Social and occupational injustice is common for clients receiving palliative or end-of-life care, as they experience increased occupational disengagement and disempowerment. A gap was identified in the Occupational Therapy department of a metropolitan Australian hospital regarding clinician skills, knowledge and confidence in working with these clients. Objective: To describe the development of an evidence informed education package designed to support occupational therapists to provide the best possible quality of care and promote occupational justice for clients receiving palliative or end-of-life care. Method: Consultation with key stakeholders and a review of existing resources including a skills audit, was conducted to identify current practice. A review of professional and grey literature was completed, and benchmarking with similar organisations provided a wider perspective on current Australian practice. Review of widely available educational resources were evaluated. Results: Baseline data collection confirmed that promoting occupational and social justice for people requiring palliative or end-of-life care was under-recognised across the health service. Benchmarking identified significant variation in educational practices across similar Australian health services. The structure and content of a face-to-face clinical education session was formulated using evidence from the literature review and relevant available resources. There are plans to transfer this education package to an e-learning platform with evaluation built into the package to allow content to remain up to date. Conclusion: Occupational Therapy clinicians are well placed to promote occupational and social justice for people requiring palliative or endof-life care but require additional occupationally focused education to optimise their practice in this area.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Brazilian Journal of Occupational Therapy
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The “Statement of Responsibility, Copyright and License Agreement” according to the model below must be signed by all the authors and sent during the article submission.
Statement of Responsibility, Copyright and License Agreement
Submission date:
Paper’s Title:
I, the undersigned, hereby certify that:
I participated in the conception of the paper and make public my responsibility for its content.
- All information concerning any source of funding received for the development of this research has been properly disclosed and made available to the editors during the submission.
- There were no connections or agreements between authors and funding sources that constitute any conflict of interest, potential or apparent, that may affect the results of the research.
- If experiments with human or animal subjects were involved all ethical procedures were followed and approved by an Institutional Review Board and that informed consent has been collected and archived when necessary, and the dissemination of images was authorized and I assume full responsibility for it.
- That the manuscript is original and that the research is not in part nor in whole currently submitted to another periodical, either in print or in an electronic format, nor is any other material of my authorship with substantially similar content so submitted.
- If requested, I will provide and cooperate fully in obtaining and providing data on which this text is based, for the editors’ examination.
- I have read and agreed with the terms of the Open Access and License Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY), available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Authors’ full names and signatures list: