Nursing Students' Reactions to an Educational Experiential Immersion in Palliative Care

Background:The nursing role includes providing compassionate care at the end of life, yet many nurses feel unprepared to provide such care. We describe nursing students' reactions during participation in an experiential immersion in palliative care in which they interacted with seriously ill patients through gifting handmade shawls. Method: After gifting, students wrote three words that best described the feeling in the room. Responses were content-analyzed to assess the frequency of specific concepts produced in the Three Words task. Gifting Reflection narratives were used to characterize the content-analysis categories. Results: Nursing students' most common responses were reflected in the categories Comfort and Kindness, and Thankfulness and Appreciation. Students also reported Sorrow and Need, but positive themes of Happiness and Delight, and Calm and Reflective were equally as prevalent. Conclusion: Experiential learning that focuses on psychosocial learning can result in nurses having positive, meaningful experiences in caring for seriously ill patients.