Satisfaction of nursing intern students with palliative care

Objective Nursing intern students are important observers in the clinical environment. Comprehensive data about palliative care in medical environment can come from a survey that asked nursing intern students about the behaviors of faculty. Methods This survey included a total of 126 third-year nursing intern students from Peking Union Medical College. A self-designed questionnaire was used to investigate the extent to which the students were satisfied about faculty's behaviors related to palliative care, including communication, symptom control and difficult conversations. The students aged 20 to 21. Results There were 63.5%(80/126) students satisfied with the pain management, 34.1%(43/126) and 35.7%(45/126) students were satisfied with the daily communication and conversations to overcome barriers between faculty and patients. Only 33.3%(42/126) were satisfied with the care to the family members after patient'deaths. Nursing intern students who recently experienced the death of patients had significantly lower satisfaction with clinical environment dealing with decedent's family members than those without this experience(25.21 vs 28.41, P＜0.01). Students who received training of palliative care had shown significantly lower satisfaction with clinical environment than those without the training (26.18 vs 31.90, P＜0.001). Conclusions Nursing intern students are unsatisfied with the clinical environment for the training of palliative care indicating some weakness in the performance of palliative care in hospital and the need to improve clinical teaching of palliative care.