Abstract
The End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) is a train-the-trainer educational program to help nursing faculty integrate care of the dying patient and the patient's family in the nursing curriculum. The authors describe the ELNEC experience, which prepares nurse educators to competently teach end-of-life care, and provides them with the necessary knowledge, skills, and resources to effectively integrate end-of-life content into existing nursing curricula.
There has been a compelling call to address the shortcomings in end-of-life nursing education and to reaffirm nursing's historical commitment to the care of the dying. 1-5 As a major nursing initiative in 1999, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) collaborated with the City of Hope National Medical Center to propose a national effort to correct educational deficiencies related to end-of-life care in nursing. This initiative has received nearly $3 million in support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The goal was to create nursing education that would meet the recommendations of the AACN "Peaceful Death" document (http://www.aacn.nche.edu/Publications/deathfin.htm). Over the course of several months of planning, these two organizations developed the End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) in February 2000.
The ELNEC curriculum has been developed through the work of project consultants and extensive input from the ELNEC advisory board and expert content reviewers. It is developed as a "Train the Trainers" course with the intention that those trained in ELNEC curriculum will be vital forces in the dissemination of knowledge related to end-of-life care. To date (3/03), there have been 591 nursing faculty participants, and 716 continuing-education faculty have received ELNEC training during 13 courses taught.