The ATLANTES program program at Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) and the School Nursing of the University of Navarra are developing a project of research to analyze how people with advanced and terminal cancer live and what aspects they consider essential in their relationship with the nursing professional who cares for them in the hospital context. The study, financed by the European Regional Fund development (ERDF), has been C in the last call of the Instituto Carlos III-Fondo de research Sanitaria (FIS).

The project is led by María Arantzamendi, researcher of the ATLANTES program of the ICS and professor of Nursing. The rest of the team is made up of Mercedes Pérez, Ana Carvajal and Begoña Errasti, professors at School; Ana Larumbe, a palliative care nurse at the ICS; Marcos Lama, a physician at the San Juan de Dios Hospital (Pamplona) specializing in palliative care. Clínica Universidad de NavarraMarcos Lama, physician at the Hospital San Juan de Dios (Pamplona), specialist in this area; and José Miguel Carrasco, sociologist of the ATLANTES program.

Patient-centered quality care

"Increasingly, the nurse-patient relationship is perceived as an important factor in the provision of quality patient-centered care," says Professor Arantzamendi.

"The importance of this relationship is even clearer, if possible, in the case of people with advanced and terminal cancer than in other patients with non-terminal pathologies. This is because the former need human accompaniment in a more obvious way - given their circumstances - and require a caring interpersonal relationship," he explains.

In his opinion, this research can contribute "to improve the way in which professionals relate to the people they care for, to increase in the future the capacity to care and to bring to the conscience of professionals what is significant for these patients, so that nursing provides higher quality care and the patients are more satisfied with it".