Palliative Patients

Caring Hospice is a company that will provide nursing care to patients that are terminally ill. The ultimate goal is to insure the patient is kept as comfortable as possible while maintaining dignity during the dying process. This company will send registered nurses to the patient’s home for routine physical assessments, medication teaching and administration, education about terminal diseases and the dying process. The nursing staff will also create and maintain appropriate plans of care for the multi-disciplinary team to provide holistic care to the patient.

On reading this article and identifying the study, there was a clear insight on how death and dying, and even improved health, impacted those nurses (Conte, 2014). Nurses, who worked closely with their patients, through the perils and suffering, culminating of death and losses, had grief not readily explored to enable that comfort zone (Conte, 2014).

Hospice patients often receive palliative care to help them cope with the stress, pain, and anxiety that comes with hospice care. Galfin, Watkins, and Harlow (2011) explored the need to train palliative care nurses how to provide not just physical care, but also psychological care. The authors reference previous studies that addressed similar training programs, but point out that many lack an explanation of what the palliative care entails, or statistical evidence to show if guided self-help improved patient’s psychological distress.

Time spent at my mother’s bedside in the intensive care unit changed my perception of the nursing profession. I realized what unique value was integrated in comprehensive nursing care, which was built on excellence, compassion, and respect. I knew right then and there that nursing was a professional path which I would like to take. Changing my college major to nursing was not a difficult decision – I wanted to repay for all that courteous care my family received in the most vulnerable time of our lives.

Before I started this class I thought palliative care was only used as end of life care, or for when a curative treatment was unavailable or had failed. As we learned about the different models of care, and how they have changed over the years, it became evident that the use of palliative care has changed drastically over the past several decades. In the 1800s to 1900s, palliative care was only used once the patient had reached the dying stage, and only included the patient in this care, not their families1. Before taking this course, this is what I thought of palliative care as well. Since the late 1900s though, palliative care has been used in a more proactive approach. From the moment an individual receives a life threatening illness, palliative care begins. This includes caring for the family of the patient as well. This care increases as the patient’s illness progresses, and even continues for the family after the death of the patient. Learning this has really made an impact on how I would like to work as a

Nurses: Assist the patients and families to cope with the end-of-life process such as assessing and

According to Allen et al. (2012), “millions of people with chronic illnesses endure unrelieved pain, uncontrolled physical symptoms and unresolved psychosocial or spiritual problems.” This issue occurs because palliative care is often considered a form of end-of-life care. Palliative care is a treatment that can be used for patients who suffer from chronic illnesses and diseases while receiving curative treatment. (Horowitz, Grambling & Quill, 2014) purposely states the misconceptions of palliative care and advocated for seriously ill patients that education must bring under control the misconceptions. Some patients do not receive appropriate symptom management because the palliative care treatment needed is often confused with end-of-life care. However, end-of-life care attempts to relieve pain and suffering when a disease is no longer responsive to curative treatment. Pain and suffering could ultimately be controlled or even eliminated through the proper utilization of palliative care. Patients who are not referred to palliative care in a timely manner is more likely to have poor quality of life, uncontrolled symptom management and increased amounts of visits to the emergency room during the disease process. Patients with life limiting illnesses bear the burden of increased discomfort and increased suffering. Nurses experience clinical practice issues and difficulties in the clinical setting during the delivery of comfort and symptom management. These issues

Death is a part of life and eventually everyone on this earth will experience it. Nurses play an important role in death. Mourning the death of a loved one is something that almost everyone will experience in this lifetime because it is a natural response to death. Bereavement, grief and mourning are all effected by one’s culture, religion, the relationship with the deceased, personality, and how the person died.

Death is inevitable at some point everyone must face it. Whether it is the death of a family member, friend, or a family pet, people are forced to deal with the death. Nurses however have more frequent encounters with death than the average person does. When a patient dies in a healthcare setting his or her nurse is obligated to deal with that as well. They must find ways to cope with the increased amount of death that

Individuals enter nursing with a wide array of experiences in how they grieve the loss of someone or something. These experiences follow them into their career and express themselves in the way they grieve for the loss of a patient. Evidence shows that this has historically been inadequate and unhealthy. To prevent the negative impact that ineffective grieving has upon the individual the approach to the grieving process must change. In doing so nurses will become more emotionally and physically stable while going through these difficult times, ultimately helping the healthcare institution to thrive.

In relation to the purpose of this study, the driving force behind the research are three questions. What are nurses experience following patient’s death? What are their actions and coping strategies following patient death? Would better learning opportunities and supportive practice environments be provided once there is an understanding of nurses’ grief and coping process, if yes, was it beneficial. The researchers proceeded with a broad question which allowed the focus to be sharpened and delineated later in the

Abstract: Nurses usually face many stressful factors and burnout conditions while caring for patients. Some of these issues include concerns for patients, their families, time factors and levels of professionalism. Communication and corporation also lead to stress among nurses caring for dying patients. Lack of enough nurses to effectively attend to the treatment needs of a larger population of dying patients is another stressful factor in the nursing profession. These issues should be addressed to make the work of nurses effective.

The aim of this assignment is to explore the experiences of nurses caring for terminally-ill patients with HIV and how these experiences influence the nature of care rendered. The HIV virulent disease has been attributed to causing nurses to feel overwhelmed by the elevated number of terminally-ill patients they care for who, because of the nature of their compromised illness, require more dedicated care than other patients. The achievement of caring was experienced by nurses as convert the patients quality of life through supportive care and hope for life. Palliative care made the nurses conscious of their own mortality, enabling them to be more sensitive, compassionate and dedicated to concern for their patients.

I have been a registered nurse at UCLA for 18 months. One particular issue that has captured my attention is the utilization of palliative care in health care. Because nurses are generally at the bedside all the time, they have an important role to play in voicing the importance of its utilization and implementation in the patient’s care.

Key importance of the palliative care approach in nursing is for it to be responsive, rather than