Palliative care not only involves bedside care, but also promote end-of-life care via professional and community education, end-of-life research, and demonstration grants. The situations are essential since people require awareness and change through legislative processes and policy forums. The ability to offer patient care during end-of-life needs knowledge in various fields such as pain management, cultural considerations, and non-pharmacological signs management. Palliative care involves 24-hour nursing presence to manage symptoms like pain, including provision of support to patients and their family members. The nurse enhances the patient’s quality of life by offering expert management regarding one’s symptoms, while applying counselling, listening, and compassionate skills (Huo, Hong and Grewal). The goals related to family support include empowering patients’ families to offer care, enhancing patients’ ultimate goals and wellbeing, and decreasing stress amongst patients and family members.
The nurses offering palliative care, aim to know end-life problems from patients’ and their families’ perspectives. The opposite is the case for nurses in medical care centers, whose approach bases on rehabilitative, curative, and preventive services. Nurses co-operate during the patient’s cultural assessment process to offer care that is culturally sensitive. One collaborates with co-workers to handle family distinctions on conflict and opinions. It has neither been always acknowledged nor recognized within management framework, structures, and systems; that taking care of families could be time consuming or complex. Case conferences and family meetings are some approaches towards offering formalized structures to facilitate decision making and communication.
The reasons for engaging with patients’ family members include offering different or additional information, societal, family, and patient expectations, the ability for family members to offer care beyond hospital settings like at home, enhancing safety and quality of care, improve their mood, helping with offering hospital care, and assisting with decision making (Taber, Ellis and Reblin).
Extended families having diverse educational levels and backgrounds portray a problem to medical care workers based on family involvement and communication. Hence the nurses’ role would be to show how to communicate effectively with one another and with the medical staff to reduce conflicts and enhance effective decision making alternatives. There is an essence of engaging family members in any conversations. The nurse could educate the family on family therapy techniques to consider applying while caring for their sick family member. The techniques include asking questions, listening, considering words to use, and management of facial expressions.
Nurses help educate patients on grooming, hygiene, and feeding themselves when they are incapable of doing such activities. The nurses manage anti-anxiety treatments like morphine when necessary. The act differentiates from nurses in medical settings, who would rarely solve problems and concentrate in daily routines. Initially, nurses lacked qualifications and knowledge to prescribe morphine because of fearing to abuse the drugs and Dangerous Drug Act’s restrictions. However, there has been changes due to continuous trainings regarding pain management, opioid use, and morphine prescriptions. Through trainings, nurses acquire knowledge on opioid usage and to what degree would pain morphine be administered, while adhering to WHO’s analgesic’s ladder. The nurse would then educate patients and family members regarding the essence of using morphine and opioids and to what extent to ensure trust and comfortability. The ability to offer patient comfort, particularly with relevant pain control, enables the nurse to also feel satisfied
Palliative care, which involves end-of-life care, has been known to be a complicated scenario affecting patients, nurses, including other care team members. Hence, several medical care organizations and systems in various nations consider end-of-life care. Besides patients’ care procedures, end-of-life care includes caring for one’s family members to collectively enhance their quality of life. Hence, to offer effective and appropriate palliative care, nurses should undergo relevant training.
Works Cited
Huo, Jinhai, et al. “Knowledge of Palliative Care Among American Adults: 2018 Health Information National Trends Survey.” Journal of Pain and Symptom Management 58.1 (2019). <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885392419301319>.
Taber, Jennifer, et al. “Knowledge of and beliefs about palliative care in a nationally-representative U.S. sample.” Plos One 14.8 (2019). <https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0219074>.
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