Acute Care Current Debate Regarding the Nurses Role

Question: Discuss current debate regarding the nurses role in promoting patients choices; in areas such as end of life care? Answer: Care consumers who die in hospitals expend most of the time in an intensive care unit receiving costly and high tech health care. Nevertheless, the terminal days of patients lives are filled frequently with useless suffering. Palliative care is considered as the care that substitute this type of situation and focuses not only on life extension but also upon giving supportive care that assists comfort and dignity of the patients. The care providers have a main contribution in easing the transition from destructive management to palliative care, despite of the system. To do so nurses should prepare them to be ethical and should prepare compassionate decisions and concurrently consider approaches to circumvent legal accountabilities (Fedoruk and Hofmeyer, 2012). Palliative care is said to be an active and complete care of patients, whose illnesses are no longer work against curative treatment, stated by the World Health Organization. It affirms life and regards dying as standard process neither goes faster nor holds up death and offers remedy from illness and pain and provides diverse suffering indications (Berman and Kozier, 2011). The palliative care delivery should not be restricted to the care consumers who are about to attain death within few months, while palliative care standards are integrated in hospice progress, as primarily considered by the Medicare and also it should be offered only to the patients registered in hospitals. Health care personnel play a significant role in the development of patients choices (Webb and Kirov, 2014). If a patient is obtaining palliative care, the health care staff are said to be the central part of a multidisciplinary team and a central part of a health care team as well. The team structure varies, but can comprise more than single nurse and primary care personnel of the client. Primary care providers may consist of dietician, social worker, chaplain, physical therapist, related health personnel and occupational therapist . Nursing care responsibilities can include pain assessment, indications of various suffering, providing evidence depended inferences to ease the complications of a patient and preventing those intervention commencement that may not amend the comfort of patients life and the quality of life. The health care personnel work with team members to concentrate on the psychological and spiritual factors of life-threatening diseases (Piers et al., 2012). Nursing professionals should work together with the family members of the patients as they may change their focus from curing patient to palliative care. The promises to the members of the patients family should be continued after patients death with counseling recommendation and complete assistance (McIlwraith and Madden, 2010). End of life care generally include choices that are morally complex and generates worries regarding probable liability. Rejection of life maintaining care, for instance dialysis process, tube feeding, and need for increase of opioid doses or sedatives are naturally complicated matters (Simmonds, 2008). Withdrawal of life sustaining therapy is legally and morally permissible if patients are generously made wish and completely informed or if the recommended treatment is causing or may present a risk to the patients or gives no benefit to the patients. References Berman, A. and Kozier, B. (2011).Kozier Erb's fundamentals of nursing, ninth edition. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall. Fedoruk, M. and Hofmeyer, A. (2012).Becoming a nurse. South Melbourne, Vic.: Oxford University Press. McIlwraith, J. and Madden, W. (2010).Health care and the law. Rozelle, N.S.W.: Thomson Reuters (Professional) Australia. Piers, R., Van den Eynde, M., Steeman, E., Vlerick, P., Benoit, D. and Van Den Noortgate, N. (2012). End-of-Life Care of the Geriatric Patient and Nurses Moral Distress.Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 13(1), pp.80.e7-80.e13. Simmonds, A. (2008). Autonomy and Advocacy in Perinatal Nursing Practice.Nursing Ethics, 15(3), pp.360-370. Webb, M. and Kirov, E. (2014).Clinical cases. Elsevier Health Sciences, p.298.