Evaluation of service user-led workshops in children’s palliative care education
Intended for healthcare professionals
Evidence and practice    

Evaluation of service user-led workshops in children’s palliative care education

Joanne Pavey Occasional lecturer-service user, University of the West of England, Bristol, England
Julie Kembrey Occasional lecturer-service user, University of the West of England, Bristol, England
Antonia Beringer Senior lecturer, University of the West of England, Bristol, England

Why you should read this article:
  • To recognise the benefits of service user involvement in healthcare education for learning and practice

  • To understand how grief and bereavement can affect the parents of children in palliative care services

  • To identify the need to develop meaningful partnerships between academics and service users to achieve authentic, person-centred healthcare education

Children’s nurses report feeling unprepared when caring for children with life-limiting conditions and their families, while the value of including service users in the provision of nursing education is increasingly recognised. This small-scale service evaluation examined the effect on learning of service user-led workshops as part of a module for final-year children’s nursing students and post-registration children’s nurses. The workshops focused on the experience of children’s palliative care and child bereavement from the parents’ perspective. Findings from evaluation data indicated high levels of satisfaction with the workshops and identified three themes: safe space, shift in perspective and enhancing practice.

A model of service user facilitated learning describes how these themes can enable learning about children’s palliative care. This evaluation suggests that the involvement of service users as partners in healthcare education can be transformative, enabling children’s nursing students to examine their own perspectives and consider ways to enhance their future practice.

Nursing Children and Young People. doi: 10.7748/ncyp.2023.e1455

Peer review

This article has been subject to open peer review and checked for plagiarism using automated software

Correspondence

josiejopavey@hotmail.com

Conflict of interest

None declared

Pavey J, Kembrey J, Beringer A (2023) Evaluation of service user-led workshops in children’s palliative care education. Nursing Children and Young People. doi: 10.7748/ncyp.2023.e1455

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dawn Hamill for her support with data management, and Lizzie Hoole, lecturer in children’s and young people’s nursing, University of the West of England, Bristol, for technical support with tables and graphs. We are also grateful to the workshop participants for their valuable feedback and would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article

Published online: 19 June 2023

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