This study aimed to identify and compare hospice care research topics between Korean and international nursing studies using text network analysis.

The study was conducted in four steps: 1) collecting abstracts of relevant journal articles, 2) extracting and cleaning keywords (semantic morphemes) from the abstracts, 3) developing co-occurrence matrices and text-networks of keywords, and 4) analyzing network-related measures including degree centrality, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, and clustering using the NetMiner program. Abstracts from 347 Korean and 1,926 international studies for the period of 1998–2016 were analyzed.

Between Korean and international studies, six of the most important core keywords-“hospice,” “patient,” “death,” “RNs,” “care,” and “family”-were common, whereas “cancer” from Korean studies and “palliative care” from international studies ranked more highly. Keywords such as “attitude,” “spirituality,” “life,” “effect,” and “meaning” for Korean studies and “communication,” “treatment,” “USA,” and “doctor” for international studies uniquely emerged as core keywords in recent studies (2011~2016). Five subtopic groups each were identified from Korean and international studies. Two common subtopics were “hospice palliative care and volunteers” and “cancer patients.”

For a better quality of hospice care in Korea, it is recommended that nursing researchers focus on study topics of patients with non-cancer disease, children and family, communication, and pain and symptom management.

This study was conducted to identify effects of debriefing based on the clinical judgment model for nursing students on their knowledge, skill performance, clinical judgment, self-confidence and learner satisfaction during simulation based end-of-life care (ELC) education.

Simulation based ELC education was developed in six steps as follows: selection of learning subjects and objects, development of learning tools, a trial run of simulation-based education, students’ skill training, and evaluators’ training. Forty-eight senior nursing students (25 in the experimental group and 23 in the control group) participated in the simulation-based ELC education using a high-fidelity simulator. Debriefing based on the clinical judgment was compared with the usual debriefing.

ANCOVA showed that there were differences in knowledge (F=4.81, p=.034), skill performance (F=68.33, p<.001), clinical judgment (F=18.33, p<.001) and self-confidence (F=4.85, p=.033), but no difference in satisfaction (t=-0.38, p=.704) between the experimental and control groups.

This study found that debriefing based on the clinical judgement model is effective for supporting nursing students for reflecting on clinical judgment and improving their diverse competencies in complex clinical settings such as ELC.