End-of-life support skills for all: Adaptation and implementation of the End-of-life Aid Skills for Everyone (EASE) training in the Flemish context

6-2024 to 5-2025

Confrontation with serious illness and end-of-life is often accompanied by avoidable discomfort and undesirable care decisions and outcomes. In recent decades, there has been a strong focus on increasing the knowledge and skills of healthcare professionals to provide care aimed at self-direction, dignity and increasing well-being. But perhaps the scope for improvement there is limited considering that only 5% of the care time of people with serious illness such as cancer consists of contacts with healthcare professionals. The other 95% consists of self-care and care contacts with partner, children, parents, friends, relatives, volunteers, neighbours, etc. Increasing knowledge and skills of these target groups through targeted training thus offers huge potential to increase community capacity to provide care and support to people with serious illness such as cancer. The End of Life Aid Skills for Everyone (EASE) training, developed in Scotland, is a promising training that can meet this need.
The training aims to enable people to feel more at ease and confident in supporting family members and community members with issues they face during serious illness, end-of-life and bereavement. The training is aimed at people who are already facing serious illness (e.g. as a sick person or as a family carer) or who want to prepare for it. A cultural adaptation of the EASE training to the Flemish context can prepare people to face the challenges of serious illness and provide care and support to loved ones.