National Consensus Project Clinical Practice Guidelines for Quality Palliative Care Guidelines, 4th Edition.

Background: The goal of the 4th edition of the National Consensus Project Clinical Practice Guidelines for Quality Palliative Care (NCP Guidelines) is to improve access to quality palliative care for all people with serious illness regardless of setting, diagnosis, prognosis, or age. Objective: The NCP Guidelines are intended to encourage and guide healthcare organizations and clinicians (including nonpalliative care specialists) across the care continuum to integrate palliative care principles and best practices into their routine assessment and care of all seriously ill patients and their family caregivers. Methods: The NCP Guidelines formalize and delineate evidence-based processes and practices for the provision of safe and reliable high-quality palliative care for adults, children, and families with serious illness in all care settings. Results: This article presents the key domains and guidelines of the 4th edition.

Designing and implementing an ambulatory oncology nursing peer preceptorship program: using grounded theory research to guide program development.

Having enough staff to provide high-quality care to cancer patients will become a growing issue across Canada over the next decades. Statistical predictions indicate that both the number of new diagnoses and the prevalence of cancer will increase dramatically in the next two decades. When combining these trends with the simultaneous trend toward health human resource shortage in Canada, the urgency of assuring we have adequate staff to deliver cancer care becomes clear. This research study focuses directly on oncology nurses. Guided by the grounded theory methodology, this research study aims to formulate a strategic, proactive peer preceptorship program through a four-phased research process. The goal of this research is to develop a program that will support experienced staff members to fully implement their role as a preceptor to new staff, to facilitate effective knowledge transfer between experienced staff to the new staff members, and to assure new staff members are carefully transitioned and integrated into the complex ambulatory cancer care workplaces. In this article, the data from the first phase of the research project will be explored specifically as it relates to establishing the foundation for the development of a provincial ambulatory oncology nursing peer preceptorship program.