Introduction. Against the backdrop of increasing life expectancy and the development of high-tech medical care for socially significant diseases, the urgency of meeting the needs of patients for palliative medical care (PMC) is increasing. Purpose of the work: as a result of a sociological survey of nurses from palliative care departments, to determine the existing problems in ensuring the quality of treatment for incurable cancer patients. Materials and methods. A population of nurses in the PMC departments of two hospitals in the Chelyabinsk region was surveyed. 76 respondents took part in the study, including 3 senior nurses, 8 dressing nurses, 7 procedural nurses and 58 ward nurses. The survey was conducted using a questionnaire specially developed by the author, which included 41 closed and open-ended questions. Results. When analyzing the nursing staff survey results, it was found that half of the respondents had already reached old age, one in three was in middle age. 13.6% of nurses with more than seven years of experience have the highest qualification category. Of the 13.4% of respondents with more than five years of experience, only one out of five has the first qualification category, and with more than three years of experience, only 12.1% have the second qualification category. 12.1% of respondents took advanced training more than five years ago, 45.9% never took it, and 1.5% took it so long ago that they couldn’t even remember. 56.9% of respondents stated that they need advanced training in PMC. A quarter of the respondents openly stated their low qualifications in sections of PMC another 5.4% of respondents have gaps in knowledge and skills in PMC, which interferes with their professional activities. Discussion. The first thing to draw attention to is the large proportion of elderly nurses, and this is in a facility where the share of heavy physical labor is significantly higher than in any other medical department. It is difficult to judge the general professional nursing knowledge and skills of nursing staff due to the small number of assigned qualification categories. Another problem of palliative care is the appearance of additional workload during the year, which is not distributed in a timely manner among the functional responsibilities of the department's nursing staff. Conclusion. The causes of problems in the provision of inpatient palliative care are: low staffing and the retirement age of half of the nurses; lack of specialization in PMC among the majority of nurses, due to the lack of the very standard of training in PMC and exceeding the deadlines for advanced training; lack of information on the number of incurable patients in the region and irrational distribution of nurses’ working time.