Recent policy has raised the profile of end-of-life care internationally, with the aim of increasing access to quality care for everyone experiencing life-limiting illness. This reflects an international shift in the provision of palliative care to encompass chronic conditions other than cancer. Nurses have an important role in delivering this care and need to be equipped with particular knowledge and skills. However, pre-registration nursing curricula have traditionally had a limited emphasis on death and dying and nurses report feeling unprepared to care for dying patients. This has led to claims that death education in pre-registration curricula is inadequate. This integrated review explores the published literature that reports on death education within pre-registration nurse education. Presenting an international overview, the aim of the review is to contribute to knowledge about the nature and extent of death education in pre-registration curricula. In the context of this paper, death education encompasses both palliative and end-of-life care. Electronic searches of major bibliographic databases found inconsistencies across educational provision with variations in quantity, content, and approach. Despite an increasing amount of death education in pre-registration curricula, there remains a deficit in key areas such as knowledge, skills, organisation of care, and teamwork. 1. Introduction The World Health Organization [1] issued a directive that all individuals dying from life-limiting illness are entitled to quality care across a range of settings when approaching death. Policy initiatives across the world have sought to respond to this directive which essentially calls for a change in culture around palliative and end-of-life care. In Europe, a number of organisations, collaborating under the auspices of the European Association for Palliative Care (EPAC) Task Force, have published several evidence-based reports which seek to influence the development of palliative care policy and practice across Europe [2]. The Eurobarometer Survey, a major qualitative study developed to gather the views of key palliative care leaders, collated information on the current state of palliative care, and the barriers to and opportunities for development of palliative care across 52 countries of the WHO European region. Developed by the EPAC Taskforce on the Development of Palliative Care in Europe, the Eurobarometer Survey found that lack of education and training opportunities are major barriers to the development of palliative care in Western Europe [3]. It
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