AACN Advanced Critical Care Volume 24, Number 2, pp. 121-129 © 2013 AACN 121 Copyright © 2013 American Association of Critical-Care Nurses. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. DOI: 10.1097/NCI.0b013e3182832a94 End-of-Life Care Education in Acute and Critical Care The California ELNEC Project Marian Grant, RN, DNP, CRNP, ACHPN Clareen Wiencek, RN, PhD, CRNP, ACHPN Rose Virani, RNC, MHA, OCN, FPCN Gwen Uman, RN, PhD Carla Munevar, MD Pam Malloy, RN, MN, FPCN Betty Ferrell, PhD, MA, FPCN Marian Grant is Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, 655 West Lombard St, Baltimore, MD 21201 (grant@son .umaryland.edu). Clareen Wiencek is Nurse Manager/Clinician, Thomas Pallia- tive Care Unit, VCUHS, Richmond, Virginia. Rose Virani is Senior Research Specialist, City of Hope, Divi- sion of Nursing Research & Education, Duarte, California. Gwen Uman is Partner Vital Research, LLC, Los Angeles, California. Carla Munevar is Clinical Research Assistant, City of Hope, Division of Nursing Research & Education, Duarte, California. Pam Malloy is ELNEC Project Director, American Association of Colleges of Nursing, Washington, District of Columbia. Betty Ferrell is Professor, Nursing Research and Education, City of Hope, Division of Nursing Research & Education, Duarte, California. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. T he mission of critical care practitioners is the concentrated care of patients with life- threatening illnesses or crises who are most likely to benefit from resource-intensive care. 1,2 Although this mission generally has not changed over the past 50 years, contextual fac- tors have. The population is aging, and con- comitant with this fact, the number of patients with multiple chronic illnesses is increasing. Persons aged 65 years and older will make up 20% of the American population by 2030, 3 and those older than 85 years are currently the fastest-growing segment. 4 The chronic illnesses of aging, such as heart failure, cancer, and dementia, are increasing as a result of these demographic shifts. The prevalence of patients with a history of cancer in the intensive care ABSTRACT Acute and critical care nurses care for an increasingly aging population in the last stages of life. Unfortunately, many of these nurses do not have adequate education to care for this population. The End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) developed a critical care course, and in 2007 the Archstone Foundation provided a grant to educate critical care nurses in California. From 2007 to 2010, 388 participants completed the course and rated it very effective at improving end-of-life care education in their institution. After completing the national ELNEC- Critical Care train-the-trainer course, these par- ticipants taught more than 2900 classes in the ELNEC modules to their colleagues. Participants also revised policies and made system changes in their workplaces to provide better care to dying critical care patients and their families. The ELNEC/Archstone program improved acute and critical care nurses’ end-of-life care educa- tion and, ultimately, practice and serves as a model for future educational efforts. Keywords: critical care, education, end-of-life care, nursing, palliative care