SON: Connections - Spring 2002

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CD Toolkit Enhances Palliative Care Nationwide

Creating a pioneering end-of-life care CD-ROM from scratch at the School of Nursing is a daunting challenge. Guaranteeing accessible expert content in a user-friendly teaching toolkit and delivering it to nearly every healthcare sector nationwide is quite another.

Thanks to a partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson foundation, the TNEEL team as part of the Cancer Pain and Symptom Management Research Group was able to do just that.

"The knowledge exists for teachers and nurses everywhere to become experts at end-of-life care," says Professor Diana J. Wilkie, who was the Principal Investigator on the 4-year $1.5 million grant project called Toolkit for Nurturing Excellence at End-of-Life Transition (TNEEL). "It's just a matter of sharing."

In 2002, Wilkie hit the road to share TNEEL with hundreds of nurses and educators, presenting at dozens of conferences and meetings from Washington DC to Oklahoma. "People come up to me and say, 'What's great about TNEEL is your team created so much usable content with a single grant, and you follow that by giving it a way," says Wilkie.

Free copies of TNEEL-NE Version 1.0 were in the hands of healthcare professionals in all 50 states by the end of 2001. Within a few weeks, the positive feedback started rolling in:

Distributing TNEEL to the public took a two-prong approach. As outlined in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant, TNEEL was mailed free to all US academic schools of nursing during December 2001 and January 2002. The single-CD toolkit was also sent at zero-cost to diploma schools of nursing and 1,000 clinical agencies.

After the initial release, additional groups around the world were given an opportunity to purchase TNEEL CDs at-cost. In May 2002, 30,000 full-color brochures were mailed highlighting TNEEL's benefits to a more diversified audience, from hospice workers to social workers and chaplains.

Via the Internet in 2003, TNEEL will provide practicing nurses (RNs, LPNs) with a self-study course on end-of-life issues.

In addition to a diverse in-house staff of coordinators, designers and programmers, TNEEL's seven content experts included: UW Nursing faculty members Diana J. Wilkie, Sarah E. Shannon, Marie-Annette Brown, and M. Kay M. Judge, as well as former faculty member Marjorie Wells, Stuart J. Farber (UW School of Medicine) and Inge B. Corless (Massachusetts General Hospital).

TNEEL provides educators with a full teaching portfolio to create classes or entire courses in up to six core areas: Comfort, connections, ethics, grief, impact and well being. Each CD includes 435 single-spaced pages of content, as well as 46 case studies, 184 audio files, 56 video clips and 1000 PowerPoint slides.

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