Clinical Aspects of Palliative Care for Registered Nurses – Spring 2025

This workshop is suitable for those who have an interest in care of the very ill, dying and bereaved; and who wish to gain foundation knowledge in palliative care:

• What is Palliative Care?
• Who is Palliative Care for?
• The ethos of Palliative Care
• Models of death and dying and their relevance to practice

This workshop will help you gain knowledge, skills and understanding of symptom assessment and general principles underpinning our approach to providing holistic palliative symptom control:

• Symptom patterns and prevalence
• Personality and symptoms
• Principles of symptom control
• Symptom assessment

This session is designed to enhance your knowledge and practice in helping palliative care patients and their families manage these complex and often underrated difficulties which may have a major impact on quality of life:

• Oral problems
• Nausea and vomiting
• Intestinal obstruction
• Constipation

One of the key focus points of this session is the role we may be able to play in helping with or mitigating against particularly distressing and emotive symptoms:

• Cough / hiccoughs
• Dyspnoea
• Haemoptysis
• Coping and management strategies

This day is aimed at those whose roles involve caring for people who have to face and cope with pain. The session will help you gain knowledge, skills and understanding of both the problems and a range of care and treatment strategies:

• Pain assessment
• Pain theories and pain mechanisms
• Concepts of pain
• Acute and chronic pain – aspects for practice with palliative care patients
• Palliative pain management strategies
• Non-drug management
• Drug management

During this session, we will consider issues relevant to palliation of organ disease and will have opportunity to examine the impact of such diagnosis/transitions of care for professionals, patients and their family members. We will explore:

• Renal disease
• Liver disease

As with the morning’s session, we will consider issues relevant to palliation of organ disease and will have opportunity to examine the impact of such diagnosis/transitions of care for professionals, patients and their family members. We will explore:

• Heart disease
• Transitions in care

Neurological disease presents us with a raft of practical, clinical and ethical problems. The aim of this event is to consider how, when and where palliative care begins and fits in with other supportive care elements:

• Ethical considerations oof treatment
• Parkinson’s disease
• Multiple sclerosis
• Motor neurone disease
• Other neurological conditions

This event offers an opportunity to review the palliative care needs in a group of people for whom assessment and communication present us with significant challenges:

• Dementia – who do we mean?
• Aims of care and transitionary processes / Individual assessment in cognitive impairment
• Managing symptoms / Maintaining personhood / Supporting families

Even within the context of palliative care some situations are emergencies. What are they? Can we prevent them? How do we manage them? What consequences do they hold? The aim of this session is to address these questions and explore practical and non-practical issues which need to be considered:

• Hypercalcaemia of malignancy
• Superior vena cava obstruction
• Haemorrhage
• Fits
• Malignant spinal cord compression
• Fractures

• Maximising physical comfort (including symptom management aspects)
• Psychosocial care for the individual and the family
• Offering spiritual care – not just ‘do you want your vicar to call?’
• Care in context – national and political influences on local services and configuration
• Self-preservation and therapeutic caring – impossible balance?