Top Fast Facts & Resources for Nurses

Fast Facts are wonderful tools for nurses, offering easy access to peer-reviewed summaries and best practice guidelines from experts in our fields, structured to enable us to quickly identify the information we need to more effectively serve our patients and families. With almost 400 Fast Facts now published on a variety of topics within the fields of hospice and palliative care, selecting the top 50 has been very difficult, and perhaps a bit arbitrary.

These “Top 50” were chosen by consensus by groups of hospice and palliative care nurse clinicians from Agnesian Healthcare in Fond du Lac,WI, and Ascension/Ministry Hospice in Rhinelander, WI, with final editing, primarily for breadth of topics, by nurse leaders on the PC NOW Board of Directors.

Fast Facts and Concepts provide concise, practical, peer-reviewed, and evidence-based summaries on key palliative care topics important to clinicians and trainees caring for patients facing serious illness.  They were started in 2000 by Eric Warm MD as a palliative care teaching tool for generalist clinicians at the University of Cincinnati. They were subsequently adopted as a standard feature of the National End-of-Life Residency Education Project, D Weissman, MD PI, (funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation).  Until 2014, Fast Facts published by the End of Life/Palliative Education Resource Center (EPERC; now closed) at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Since 2015, PCNOW has hosted Fast Facts and Concepts as part of their mission to promote palliative care education to generalist clinicians.