Palliative care help the patient through an combined team containing a doctor, nurse, social worker, psychologies, religious-oriented pharmacist, and physiotherapist.…
The Department of Health’s 2008 End of Life Care Strategy, provides a comprehensive framework aimed at promoting high quality care for all adults approaching the end of life in all care settings in England. Caring for patients at the end of life is a challenging task that requires not only the consideration of the patient as a whole but also an understanding of the family, social, legal, economic, and institutional circumstances that surround patient care. A legal requirement of end of life care is that the wishes of the individual, including whether CPR should be attempted, as well as their wishes how they are cared for after death are properly documented. This means that their rights and wishes even after death are respected.…
The team should be knowledgeable to give proactive care, understand the patient's preferences and forgive conflicts. The process of truth telling in advanced cancer or any other terminal illness can be a difficult task. Whenever a patient is too moribund and not in a suitable mental stage, the family carers are required to give informed consent. The doctor and nurse in the palliative care team have to build the communication with a responsible family carer so that confidentiality and dignity for patient's last stage are maintained.[1,2] Communication is meant to deal with ethical questions regarding two fundamental aspects of Palliative Care: To explain the concept of a good death and to resolve the conflicting needs of patient vis-à-vis family.[8]…
Palliative and hematological cancer care is the health interventions performed by nurses to improve quality of life, not only of a dying patient but his family too. Nurses who continuously give this kind of interference in a fast – pace and more complex condition might experience much stress and may become more vulnerable to compassion fatigue, burnout and resilience.…
Lugton J. & Kindlen M. (2000) Palliative care: The nursing role. 2nd Edition. Harcourt Brance Ltd.…
Nurses will be the primary provider implementing this commitments and making sure that they are adhered to by every healthcare professional that is involved in the patient’s care.…
However this emotional support has been underestimated, as an example, clinical pathways are applied across the world in the past 10 years (Phillips et al., 2011), although they are widely implemented, they do not include emotional or psychosocial support. In order to improve the care of the terminal ill person is important to provide all the necessary elements to establish a better relationship between nurses and patients, fundamental aspects are communication, knowledge, and…
The nurse has an ethical responsibility to respect the patients care choices related to palliative care in opposition to traditional treatment. Holistic and patient-centered care focuses on understanding and prioritizing the patient/family’s wishes and ensuring that they are making informed decisions regarding care decisions. Often times, when the patient or the healthcare proxy has elected palliative care, other family members may disagree with this choice. The family may ask the nurse to help convince the patient/healthcare proxy that traditional treatment the most appropriate choice. The nurse would have an ethical dilemma and must be nonbiased and follow the patient’s decision, as long as the decision does not…
Additional concepts often associated with palliative care include hospice care and comfort care or comfort measures. Palliative care provides many of the same functions as hospice care such as symptom relief, psychological, spiritual and decision making support. Unlike hospice it is still appropriate to pursue additional lifesaving modalities such as chemotherapy or surgery while receiving palliative care (Ouimet Perrin and Kazanowski, 2015). Comfort Care has been described as a form of palliative care in which interventions are provided to obtain symptoms relief for patients who are close to death (Blinderman and Billings, 2015). Due to overlapping similarities, patients and health care providers still have confusion about these related…
Cultural diversity in the medical field in regards to palliative care is, at times, greatly hindered because of religious beliefs, language barriers, and the hierarchies of diverse cultures, and these have the propensity to affect the continuity of care for the patients. People from different cultures have their own perspectives on health and disease. Some cultures believe in using traditional medicine, and some believe in the healing power of praying and herbal healing. People are often affected by their own cultural beliefs when it comes to diseases, and how they can find the right cure or die with the dignity they have through the dictation of their culture. Sometimes, religion and cultural beliefs get in the way of receiving the medical…
End of life care is one of the most taboo topics in American society as it requires those involved to acknowledge that their lives will eventually come to an end. Planning for such an outcome can be difficult but ultimately it is necessary in order to save others from dealing with the burden of end of life care while unprepared. As a nurse it is especially important to have a firm grasp of the many different factors that weigh in decisions related to end of life care and be ready to assist both the patient and his or her family in any way needed when that time may come. A careful examination of the resources available in a community to assist with this care, the gaps in care prevalent in American society today, the cultural…
Palliative care is sympathetic care to keep the patient as comfortable as possible and is the last available care to the patient who is suffering from an incurable illness or disease. It has been argued that palliative care could decrease in use if the right to die becomes more prevalent. Ensuring that all patients have been…
Karlawish, J.H., Quill, T. and Meier, D.E. (1999) A consensus-based approach to providing palliative care to patients who lack decision-making capacity. Annals of Internal Medicine, 130 (10), pp. 835-40.…
According to World Health Organization, Palliative care is an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families who are facing problems associating with life threatening illnesses. Palliative care helps provide relief from the pain and other symptoms, such as having someone talk through the patient's mental condition or administering certain pain relief medication. This type of care also tries to enhance the quality of life, and they also tries to positively influence the course of the illness.…
Overall, I had a great shift. My shift started by giving medication to my assigned resident. But before administering medication, I had to take her blood pressure. One of the interesting things that I found was administering nebulizer for the first time. It was definitely learning and getting a new experience at the same time. However, once I was administering medication and documenting that, I was back to the patient. Moreover, I did take the rest of the vital signs for my assigned resident. In additionally, giving morning care and then escort the resident to the dining room for breakfast. A new experience that we were able to experience as a group was caring for a palliative patient. As a group, we gave a complete bed bath to a palliative…