[Does primary care intervention have an impact in the place of death for patients in a palliative care program?]

[Assessment of basic training needs in palliative care in primary healthcare nurses in Spain]

AIM

Asses training, perception of readiness and training needs in palliative care (PC) theoretical and practical of primary care nurses in Spain, through descriptive cross-sectional study.

DESIGN

Descriptive cross-sectional study.

SETTING

Primary care nurses in Spain with online access.

PARTICIPANTS

Primary care nurses in Spain, January and February 2021. 344 responses, 339 met the inclusion criteria.

MAIN NEASUREMENTS

Sociodemographic variables, PC training, training needs were analyzed. Through Google Forms online questionnaire and INCUE Instrument. Descriptive analyses were performed and the results were compared using the exact symmetry test and the Mann-Whitney test.

RESULTS

82,6% women, with an average age of 45.5years. 86.1% of the nurses had training in PC, been basic in the 45.4%. Only 40.5% feel quite or very prepared to take care for palliative patients. Nurses demanded more training in psycho-emotional and grief and coping with losses. 83.76% passed the theoretical block compared to 43.36% of the practical, detecting higher training needs in the last (P<.001). The passed rates varied depending on the educational level.

CONCLUSIONS

Nursing training in PC in primary care continues to be deficient, especially in practical application. Targeted training is necessary to have an impact on the care of people with palliative needs and their families.

Feasibility of using death certificates for studying place of death in Latin America

Objective

This paper assesses the availability and quality of death certificate data in Latin America and the feasibility of using these data to study place of death and associated factors.

Methods

In this comparative study, we collected examples of current official death certificates and digital data files containing information about all deaths that occurred during 1 year in 19 Latin American countries. Data were collected from June 2019 to May 2020. The records for place of death and associated variables were studied. The criteria for data quality were completeness, number of ill-defined causes of death and timeliness.

Results

All 19 countries provided copies of current official death certificates and 18 of these registered the place of death. Distinguishing among hospital or other health care institution, home and other was possible for all countries. Digital data files with death certificate data were available from 12 countries and 1 region. Three countries had data considered to be of high quality and seven had data considered to be of medium quality. Categories for place of death and most of the predetermined factors possibly associated with place of death were included in the data files.

Conclusions

The quality of data sets was rated medium to high in 10 countries. Hence, death certificate data make it feasible to conduct an international comparative study on place of death and the associated factors in Latin America.