Background: The main purpose of palliative care is to manage symptoms among patients, reduce their burden of pain, and improve their quality of life. Nurses are an essential part of the palliative care team in providing high standards of care since they spend the longest time with patients. However, lack of adequate knowledge of palliative care is considered as one of the main barriers to palliative care development and practise.
Objective: To evaluate Jordanian nursing students' knowledge about palliative care.
Design: A quantitative research method and descriptive online-survey design were used.
Results: The sample consisted of 220 nursing students; the mean age was 20.5, SD 2.5, and most of the students were female (67), 74 (34%) were fourth-year students and 58 (26%) were in their third year. The total mean score was low, at 8.0 (SD 3.1), ranging from 0 to 18 and the number of correctly answered statements ranged from 60 (27%, statement no. 3) to 145 (66%, statement no. 2). It was found that there were no significant impacts (H (3) = 5.69, p = 0.137) for place of study. However, students' knowledge was strongly affected by their academic level (H (3) = 12.60, p = 0.005).
Conclusions: Integrating palliative care education is required as the mainstay to improve students' knowledge and therefore practise. This education needs to be comprehensive in covering the basic principles of palliative care and symptom management and it should be distributed throughout the different courses to discuss palliative care within different contexts, such as elderly, paediatric and adult settings.