Palliative care in nursing training: higher education course coordinators’ perception

OBJECTIVES: to analyze undergraduate nursing course coordinators’ perception about nursing training in palliative care. METHODS: a descriptive study, with a qualitative approach and thematic content analysis, carried out with coordinators of nursing courses in Higher Education Institutions in Rio Grande do Norte. RESULTS: three thematic categories emerged: Nursing training in palliative care; Potentialities for teaching palliative care; and Challenges of teaching in palliative care. The coordinators described as potentialities: transversality, theoretical and practical approach, optional subject, university extensions, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinary approach, and as challenges: biomedical model in health education and insufficient professor training. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS: palliative care teaching in the researched institutions in the nursing education process is approached in an incipient and fragmented way, and almost always without having a specific curricular component on the subject, being present as one of its contents.