Reading and Reflecting on Experiential Accounts of Hospital Patients to Foster a Person-Centered Care Approach: A Novel Educational Method

Background: Innovative teaching methods are needed to ensure end-of-life care is provided by nurses through a person-centered approach.Aims: This study was designed to (a) explore the self-identified impact of reading dying patient experiential narrative accounts on undergraduate nursing students; and (b) explore the teaching usefulness of patient experiential narrative accounts for enhanced undergraduate nursing student awareness of the need to pro- vide person-centered end-of-life care.Methods: Qualitative descriptive study, with 31 undergraduate nursing students reading experiential narra- tive accounts of dying patients and reflecting on them. A thematic analysis was carried out on the written student reflections. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize student socio-demographic data and their answers to questions on a reaction response sheet designed to assess how useful this activity had been from their perspective.Findings: Three main themes were identified: (1) gaining an insightful understanding of the relationship between the nurse and the person with advanced-terminal illness; (2) gaining awareness of themselves as nurses in their clinical practice; (3) pointing out how nurses should behave and what they should do to place the person living with advanced-terminal illness at the center of nursing practice. Among all respondents, 87.09% of students thought this was a useful learning activity.Conclusions: Reflecting on patient experiential accounts is an innovative teaching method, which help with nursing students value and gain insight into person-centered end-of-life care.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of Organization for Associate Degree Nursing. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)