ELNEC Educating New Graduates in Collaboration with AACN/Vizient Nurse Residency Program

The End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) team is working with the 600 AACN/Vizient nurse residency programs to provide primary palliative care education to registered nurses new to practice. Although many schools have adopted the ELNEC Undergraduate/New Graduate Curriculum, only approximately 500 of the over 2,000 ADN and BSN/Prelicensure programs are consistently using the curriculum for their students. In an effort to ensure all new registered nurses have this essential education, especially during the challenging time of the COVID pandemic, ELNEC is donating a link to the curriculum to each of the AACN/Vizient programs. Nurse residency coordinators will have access to the link for the 12-month nurse residency program and will guide the new graduates through the curriculum, either in a face-to-face class or online. The first states to join in this initiative are Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.

The Nurse Residency Programs also will be utilizing the online COVID-19 resources that ELNEC created in March 2020, which are updated and revised continuously. These COVID-19 materials are free to nurses, including faculty, and address communication challenges during the pandemic, pain and symptom management specific to COVID-19, dealing with loss, grief, and addressing compassion fatigue. These resources can be very helpful to students engaging in clinical practice during the pandemic.

For more information about the free COVID-19 nursing resources, please go to: https://www.aacnnursing.org/ELNEC/COVID-19

For more information about the revised 2020 ELNEC Undergraduate/New Graduate Curriculum and the 2019 ELNEC Graduate Curriculum, please contact Dr. Polly Mazanec, ELNEC Undergraduate/Graduate Project Director, at pmm@case.edu or Andrea Garcia-Ortiz at elnec@coh.org.