The Nursing Practice and End-of-Life Care, Essay Example

According to the National Institute on Aging, end-of-life care can be defined as the “support and medical care given during the time surrounding death” which can often last for weeks or months, depending on the illness of the patient. From the viewpoint of a nurse, this final period in the life of a patient can be quite difficult but as a professional healthcare provider in a hospital or clinical setting, a nurse is required to provide the dying patient with the best supportive and palliative care possible with the main goal being to “prevent or relieve suffering as much as possible while respecting the dying person’s wishes” (End of Life: Helping With Comfort and Care, 2015, pp. 4-5).

One of these personal wishes or desires on the part of the patient is that he/she wants to die at home under a familiar environment that might be filled with old memories and things from the dying person’s past, such as photographs and other keepsakes. In the old days, most people died at their homes or in the homes of relatives. This was because of the desire to be surrounded by loved ones and other family members. But today, advances in medical science have helped to extend the lives of people who normally would not have survived beyond a certain amount of years because of a critical disorder or illness.

Thus, most elderly people end up in a hospital or a nursing home where they can receive the proper treatment for their illness or in a hospice where they are comforted and cared for during their final days of life. There are also economic reasons for this, such as not being able to afford an in-house caregiver or nurse and in some instances, not having a home, due to foreclosure or the loss of income. But most of the time, patients opt to receive treatment and care in a hospital or clinical setting, due to the availability of a physician or other medical professional just in case of a medical emergency. But, “if given the choice, each patient and/or

his/her family usually considers which type of medical care makes the most sense, where that kind of care can be provided, whether family and friends are available to help, and of course, how they will manage the cost” (End of Life: Helping With Comfort and Care, 2015, p. 18).

Providing comfort and care to a dying patient is perhaps the most emotionally charged event that a professional nurse will ever experience. One area that the nurse will be involved in is providing palliative care or a form of therapy designed to relieve or reduce the intensity of uncomfortable symptoms that accompany an illness, especially pain. However, as noted by the National Institutes of Health, palliative care does not necessarily mean end-of-life care and shown be viewed as medical treatment that is provided to “anyone of any age who is suffering from the discomforts, symptoms, and stress of a serious illness” (Preparing for the End of Life, 2015). This type of treatment and care is also used to “provide relief from many chronic conditions and their treatments” and elderly patients “that are living with one or more chronic illnesses may benefit from palliative care” prior to care for the end-of-life process. Thus, palliative care can be administered for as long as it is needed by the patient. A nurse may also be required to provide palliative care to a patient in a hospice which is defined by Medicare as a “program of care and support for a dying person whose doctor and a hospice medical director certify has less than six months to live” (Preparing for the End of Life, 2015).

But overall, a professional nurse can only do so much when it comes to providing palliative care and helping his/her patients with their personal desires related to the end-of-life process. Some patients might plead with their nurses to help them to return to their homes so they can die in familiar surroundings, but this is often not possible, due to the orders of a physician or other medical specialist. With this in mind, all that a nurse can actually do is provide comfort to a dying patient in the role of a loving friend or family member who sees the patient as an important person in his/her life instead of merely as another common patient in a hospital bed.

References

End of life: Helping with comfort and care. (2015). National Institute on Aging. Retrieved from http://www.nia.nih.gov/sites/default/files/end_of_life_helping_with_comfort_care_0.pdf

Preparing for the end of life. (2015). NIH SeniorHealth. Retrieved from http://nihseniorhealth.gov/endoflife/preparingfortheendoflife/01.html