Physician Assisted Suicide Case Study

Almost everyone goes through this at some point of their lives, and you are not judged or discriminated upon. When you are very sick and unable to take care of yourself and can’t do things on your own, it is the nurse’s job to take care of you. The nurses use a thermometer to check their patient’s temperature and give them food to help them heal and recover. On the other hand, when doctors need to cure you or prevent you from a disease or illness, they insert needles to cure that disease, or make you immune to it to help you stay healthy. The reason all the Nacirema assumptions seem bizarre to us is because hospitals aren’t that extreme, or don’t seem that way to us.

Giving myself time to read up on nursing experiences, attending more clinical practice labs, participating and watching these duties in the health care setting will allow me to develop a secure level of confidence the next time that this type of situation may occur. Staying in the room allowed me to experience the feeling of support while looking past social norms and how they are challenged. I met my personal values, and I believe that one should respect another person`s privacy. This understanding allowed me to be there to support the resident during her time of need. In the article `starting out` by Jane Schulz, a nursing student shares her experience of helping her colleague assist an elderly patient with daily care. Observing the compassion and care between nurse and patient from fundamental tasks, she took away a valued lesson of how our support and caring methods affect an individual. My relation to this story allowed me to reflect on the effects my care and supporting actions had on our patient.

The most relevant theory in this situation is the preservation of integrity for the patient and in my practice. In order to preserve integrity and social justice I want to attain a respectful nurse-patient relationship. The nurse-patient relationship in high acuity as written in Module 1 BCIT High Acuity course “is one of the central aspects of high acuity nursing practice” (Bungay, 2005, p. 40). I feel confident this theory is the central aspect of all nursing practice. All patients, including the one I’m referring to in this journal, has her own unique beliefs, history, and experience. On top of these, the patient is now, due to critical illness, experiencing an actual or potential physiological crisis (Bungay, 2005, p. 42). It would useful and respectful of me to acknowledge that on top of her present concerns, all concerns she had prior admission still exist. I did not give her the opportunity to express her concerns. I never asked her if she had a cat she was concerned about, was missing Saturday’s farmer’s market, wanted a Sherry, missed her friend, or disliked men. There could be a myriad of things that may be concerning her at the time. All real and potential factors support or challenge having a positive relationship with the patient (Bungay, 2005, p. 41).

The following case study addresses the care I provided to a patient who was brought in by ambulance to the emergency department after a gunshot wound.

Two hours until shift change and Sally Smith, RN was looking forward to going home and putting her aching legs up on the ottoman and drinking an ice cold Coke. She was thinking to herself that the patients were so needy all the time, she felt she gave them all she had and still all she had was not enough. All Sally heard was “get me this” and “get me that”…

A nursing career and caring for the sick intertwine inseparably. It requires a tremendous amount of compassion and empathy to care for those who are in need. My philosophy of care is to treat others with dignity, respect and compassion regardless of their race, ethnicity or cultural background. It’s about treating people the way you want to be treated and to understand that sometimes the best medicine of all is kindness. In addition, not only is it important to provide effective and competent care to all patients, it’s extremely crucial to provide care that is genuine and compassionate. All health care consumers should be receiving care that reflects their values and beliefs.

The role of a nurse has been evolving with advancement in technology and changes in the healthcare system. The level of compassion displayed towards patients however does not change. For example, in the movie, Vivian’s nurse Susie was the one to show her

Through time, there has always been a question on the idea of another supernatural being, a greater power, or a God. People have grown up and been taught certain beliefs, and some have developed their own beliefs based on this idea of a higher power. There are then those who don’t believe in any such thing; they believe in the facts presented to them. As a whole, the specifics of this idea vary, and as a nurse, understanding of this must be achieved to successfully care for a patient. Hospitals are already known to have a depressing effect on patients, then added onto that are patients who are suffering from acute or terminal illnesses. Their pain in many ways, gets passed on to the nurses who have gotten close with them through the care,

Empathy is defined as the ability to communicate an understanding of a client’s feelings, and is a crucial component of the helping relationship (Boggs. 2011, p.106). Empathy is an essential concept to nursing practice as it allows the nurse to gain perspective in order to provide appropriate actions and interventions significant to that patient’s individual experience. In Tilda Shalof’s “A Nurses’ Story”, the author, a registered nurse in the intensive care unit (ICU), struggles with a particularly difficult patient case and must reflect upon her own values and subsequent judgments in order to provide adequate nursing care.

All patients in the hospital have a story behind them that brought them to the hospital. Being a nurse for nine months, some patients have left a footprint in my mind and heart. One such patient was Mrs. R. She was diagnosed with a tumor in her abdomen which then metastasized to her lungs. It was a weekend morning, in which I was getting reports on my patients. The previous shift nurse gave the report on Mrs. R and told me that she was forty-six-year-old Hispanic woman with metastasized cancer to the lungs. Patient recently came to know about the diagnosis and never had any symptoms or pain, but the patient was in the last stage. When I went into the patient room to introduce myself, I found that the patient had been crying for whole night.

The results came in confirming a malignant tumor in my mother’s breast, and I knew her hopes had been crushed, but she remained strong. After the surgery, another biopsy established that the cancer was found on the outside of her tumor and also in her lymph nodes, so it was very possible that it could spread. She would need to get a mastectomy.

It is important for nurses to show respect for patient's religion, culture and right to choose. For instance, a critical care nurse may feel that choosing to suffer is cruel, however, it is a moral obligation for nurses to provide care that is impartial, and to respect patients’ autonomy and free will. As an ICU nurse, I have been privileged to care for critically ill patients who chose to endure the suffering. I allow them to express their feelings, I listen, and empathize with them and their loved ones.

On a daily basis there is a lot of thought and focus directed at these patients to assure they are getting quality medical care; you may have caught a medication error, made multiple phone calls, waited on hold for what seems like forever, waited on doctors, ran to another floor all to get a patient something they needed or wanted, or may the nurse noticed an important change in the patients status that could dramatically affect their outcome. Most times the patient does not see or not even know about these behind the scenes battles to ensure quality care. Conversely, most often, especially when considering a patient in the hospital setting, our perception is our reality. Patients often do not know the ins and outs of procedure and protocol and rely solely on their perception of the care they are receiving. Studies have shown that patients desire to be perceived and cared for as individuals. Lying in that bed waiting on a nurse for 20 minutes for pain medication may just translate into lack of care on the nurses’ part to the patient but in reality the nurse was caught in another room with a different patient with a situation he or she couldn’t walk away from. Often nurses are stressed which can also convey a certain harshness to patients. In other cases maybe the job has become so repetitive that the nurse

Professor, Hildegard Peplau believed that the nurse-patient relationship must be understood before us nurses can work with our patients and provide the best care for them. Providing holistic nursing care to my patients and their families to me is a continuity of the care that I have dedicated to my patient within my shift and onward. I know that I am not prepared with any formal education but I know where and how to locate hospital personnel; chaplain, priest, rabbi at the request of my patient and being that I am providing bedside care entails caring for my patient, the whole person, their body, their mind and their spirit. When my patients are in pain, or experiencing suffering for example; just listening to them express any anxiety, anger,

Not only are nurses responsible for the physical health of their patients, but they are burdened with an unwritten an obligation to bettering the emotional health of their patients. This is an incredible and oftentimes overwhelming role that they are asked to play. It is suggested that there is a moral necessity for a creation of space, and education to allow nurses to carry out this moral duty of bearing witness to suffering, disorder, disease, grief, joy, fear and vulnerability with others (Naef, 2006).