A global exploration of palliative community care literature: An integrative review

This review sought to discover how community nurses globally provide palliative care, with specific focus on how they manage the personal and professional stressors associated with caring for dying clients in the home.

An integrative review methodology was used to gain insight into how community palliative care is delivered worldwide.

The provision of home palliative care by community nurses gives clients the ability to spend their final days in familiar surroundings. Research has focussed on the provision of palliative care in the inpatient setting, with little known about the community setting.

Data were collected through a literature search, then a critical analysis approach was used to evaluate the strengths of palliative care literature by analysing recurrent themes to stimulate further research on the topic.

The following databases were used to conduct the literature search: CINAHL, Medline, Pubmed, Scopus, Ovid.

The results highlighted the importance of building a skilled palliative community nursing workforce and the need to offer specialised palliative care training to nurses, particularly around difficult conversations and service coordination.

The literature identified the challenges implicit within the community nursing role in delivering palliative care, but it did not identify the factors that enhance the nurses' ability to manage the stressors associated with this role. The input of nurses must be sought to understand the development of resilience.

Community palliative care nursing requires time spent with clients and family members who are suffering, therefore predisposing nurses to stress. Effort must be made to provide palliative care nurses with support to enhance professional resilience.