Palliative care should be a core subject in nursing and medical studies. More than 500 students from the Nursing Schools at Soria and the University of Navarra expressed this view through their participation in a program coordinated by the Navarra academic center and by Montserrat Ballesteros of the Universidad de Valladolid.

Her thesis, "Palliative care education in medicine and nursing: A qualitative analysis of students' reflections," further underlines how training in this area helps students "approach the medical profession's essence."

"It is very interesting to see how university students from different majors and academic centers agree on the need to make this subject obligatory," as the author stressed. Students also noted that palliative care represented a "personal and professional change" for them and "that it had helped them develop a more comprehensive view of the profession." Finally, they also stressed the importance of attending this course with modules focused on both theory and practice.

According to Montserrat Ballesteros, there are deficiencies in palliative care education. "Not even half of Spanish nursing and medical schools offer this course as a core subject. In fact, it is often combined with another course or offered as optional. In our country, this should be reconsidered because curricula standards include the acquisition of these skills."

Carlos Centeno, Professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Director of the Palliative Care Unit at the Clinica Universidad de Navarra, and Mary Arantzamendi, Director of the Masters in Palliative Care in Nursing at the University of Navarra, directed the study, which is the first Spanish thesis on undergraduate palliative medicine education. The study is part of the ICS ATLANTES program at the University of Navarra.

The President of the Central Committee on Deontology within the Medical College, Marcos Gómez, and the Scientific Coordinator for the Ministry of Health's National Strategy for Palliative Care, Javier Rocafort, among other experts in the field, attended Ballesteros' thesis defense.