Palliative Care Nursing: Podcast with Betty Ferrell about ELNEC

GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Care Podcast

As Betty Ferrell says on our podcast today, nurses play an essential role in care of people with serious illness. Who spends the most time with the patient in the infusion center? Doing home care? Hospice visits? In the ICU at the bedside? Nurses.

ELNEC (End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium) celebrates it’s 25th anniversary in 2025. We talk today with Betty Ferrell, who has been a nurse for 47 years, and is the founder and PI of ELNEC.

As I argue on the podcast, ELNEC has likely done more to lift the primary palliative care skills of clinicians than any other initiative. Full stop. Some numbers to back it up:

1. ELNEC has trained more than 48,000 providers in a train the trainer model

2. Over 1.5 million clinicians have been educated in ELNEC

3. ELNEC curricula are integrated int 1180 undergraduate and 394 graduate Schools of Nursing

4. ELNEC has been taught in over 100 countries

Today we talk about the origin story of ELNEC, the special role of nurses in palliative care, empowering as well as educating nurses, interprofessional ELNEC training, and opportunities and challenges ELNEC faces over the next 25 years.

Enjoy!

-@AlexSmithMD