End-of-Life-Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC)－Japan

The End-of-Life-Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) project begun in 2000 with the collaboration between American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), Washington, DC and the City of Hope, Los Angeles in the United States. The ELNEC project is a national education initiative to improve palliative care. The project provides undergraduate and graduate nursing faculty, continuing education providers, staff development educators, specialty nurses in pediatrics, oncology, critical care and geriatrics, and other nurses with training in palliative care. Those participants receive teaching materials filled with quality resources once certified as ELNEC trainers so that they can teach this essential information to nursing students and practicing nurses.

More than 21,400 nurses representing over 90 countries including the US have been trained with ELNEC national courses. It is estimated that ELNEC trainers have trained more than 642,000 nurses and other healthcare providers throughout the world.1 There are ELNEC-Core, ELNEC-Pediatric Palliative Care, ELNEC-Critical Care, and ELNEC-Geriatric, ELNEC-for Veterans, ELNEC-for Public Hospitals, ELNEC-Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRN) available in the US.

With funding from the Health and Labour Sciences Research Grant for Clinical Cancer Research from 2007 to 2009, the ELNEC Core curriculum was translated into Japanese by bilingual interdisciplinary team members of the ELNEC-Japan project team who specialize in palliative and end of life care in Japan. It was then modified to make it relevant to the field and respectful to Japanese culture. This resulted in the ELNEC-Japan Faculty Development Program. The Japanese Society for Palliative Medicine (JSPM) has started to support ELNEC-Japan project in 2009 as a part of its educational projects. The society established ELNEC-Japan Working Progress Group within its education board and sponsored the ELNEC-Japan Core train-the-trainer courses since 2009. To date, there 1,630 nurses have been trained as ELNEC-Japan Core trainers. It is estimated that those trainers have returned to their institutions and regions and have trained more than 18,000 nurses and other interdisciplinary team members since statistics were first compiled in 2011.

ELNEC-Japan Project Mission and Goals

MISSION: ELNEC-Japan is committed to…

• Deliver quality end of life care for all people.

GOALS: ELNEC-Japan will…

• Educate core expert nursing educators of end of life/ palliative nursing care.

• Provide teaching resources to ensuring competence in end of life/ palliative nursing education.

1. American Association of Colleges of Nursing. ELNEC Fact Sheet. 2016; http://www.aacn.nche.edu/elnec/about/fact-sheet. 　Accessed 2017/01/19.

February10th, 2017