... enough experience with end-of-life care to help families learn the ropes.

Hospice/palliative care assignments are usually pretty rewarding. Your number one mission is to delete pain and make sure the patient is comfortable. That mission is pretty doable, because you no longer have the rigors of critical care medicine to worry about in a patient who is failing.

Number two mission (and maybe the actual bigger job) is to educate the family. Many families just haven't been through an end-of-life scene before. If you can help them understand what comes next, what we do and what we don't, how pain control is accomplished and what the protocols are, it removes a lot of fear of the unknown.

Many people also don't know what death "looks like". When a family correctly knows the signs and can tell when it's coming or when it's not time yet, they are usually pretty natural about how to react and what the patient needs from them in their last hours -- these things are sort of innate to most people. If not, a few gentle suggestions are enough to elicit a good situation. If you play your cards right, even an end-of-life scene can be sort of a joyful thing.

This kind of work is very rewarding for a nurse, because if you've been able to move the scene in a joyful direction even a little bit, that will be a day the family remembers forever -- and in a good way.