Palliative care nurse: A quantitative study of caring for neonates at end-of-life stage

This study aimed to evaluate the quality of the care provided to newborns at End-of-Life (EOL) stages and compare the care is already being given to the infants admitted to the NICUs of the selected hospital in Tehran with the existing standards. Aim: Knowing how End-of-Life nursing care is provided, comparing with the standard in the terminal stage of neonates’ life can provide accurate information for policies, research, and educational practices. In this descriptive study, 100 nursing care services, provided to the neonates at the EOL stages and their parents, were observed and compared to the standard checklist which had been developed based on the literature review and existing standards in 2015. The study setting included the NICUs of the four hospitals affiliated to Shahid Beheshti university of Medical Science, Tehran, Iran. The Content and Face Validity of the checklist were determined based on specialists’ comments. The Content Validity Index was 94.85%, and its reliability was evaluated too through the inter-rater correlation coefficient (ICC = 0.715). The data were analyzed using SPSS-19. Only 11.49% of EOL nursing care services were given properly and 77.92% were not given at all. Results showed that 10.59% of EOL nursing care services were performed improperly. The overall rate of accordance with the EOL nursing care standards was poor (16.78%). Nursing care given to infants and their parents at EOL stages is far from the standards. This can be due to various reasons, such as inadequate training and the lack of comprehensive guidelines.