Death is inventible to all living things. What is more challenging is the ever-increasing number of chronic lifestyle diseases such as cancer. Patients with such life-threatening diseases suffer various physical discomforts and a range of spiritual and psychosocial concerns at the end-of-life stage. Meaning, such patients require health services more than ever as their diseases progress towards the end-of-life stage. This has been the reason behind the enhancement of end-of-life care, including palliative care that spotlights on patients with acute illnesses and a life expectancy of between six to twelve months. Various caregivers provide the services, and they are meant to help dying patients to die in dignity, peace, and comfort. Understanding caregivers' experience is vital in the comprehension of the role of nursing practice in supporting dying patients.
Throughout the time I that I have taken care of dying patients, I have come to realize that the most dominant attitude in western culture is one of denying death and dying. Dying and death are primarily regarded as "taboo" subjects. This has always been the reason why most people refuse to confront death. Meaning, thoughts, and experiences of death are adversative to the current cultural beliefs, which proclaim that death is not a "natural" phenomenon in human life. I saw many patients shy away from death and dying, regardless of the benefits for the terminally ill linked with the caring philosophy of the palliative and hospice care association. Moreover, the attitude has made dying patients to prefer to die in nursing homes or hospitals away from friends and family members.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Furthermore, my encounter with the sudden and unexpected death of my clients had always left me with emotional and psychological stress. I often found myself thinking about dying and death in advance. This made me to suffer unconstructive emotions, including regrets and guilt of not being able to prevent the patients from dying. However, I could often share my experience with others and feel relieved. Besides, my working with more experienced nurses seemed to provide practical and emotional support in dealing with my emotions and psychological feelings. Additionally, my most encouraging experiences were characterized by the compassionate persuade of opportunities for expression with my peers.
From my experience, I have discovered that nurses can eliminate dying and death denial through the offering of emotional support to family and their dying member in agreement with their desires and beliefs. Meaning, it is significant for the nurses to speak concerning death with the dying patient as well as to his or her family to prepare them psychologically and perhaps find the best way to help the patient acquire peaceful death (O’Mara & Zborovskaya, 2016). This can only be achieved if the nurses can recognize their own attitudes, fears, and emotions about death and learn to handle them.
Furthermore, the idea of "good death" has become an essential political and social priority among many countries. The idea differs in meaning, depending on the perception of the family, patient, public, and healthcare experts. From the nurse's point of view, a good death needs high caring standards, including holistic care and optimal symptom management, offered to both family and patient (O’Mara & Zborovskaya, 2016). Therefore, as the families of the ailing members seek information and advice on how to ease the dying family member, nurses play a significant role in the provision of information and advice. Moreover, nurses working on delicate care units are expected to give high caring standards of end-of-life in a curative-oriented background (Lai, Wong & Ching, 2018). This indicates that nurses are supposed to help patients and their families obtain effective decision making, efficient symptom controlling measures, and suitable treatment that do not extend the dying process.
In conclusion, experience obtained during caring for the dying person can have both negative and positive impact on the caregiver. Some have abandoned nursing in palliative care because of the fear of seeing dying patients. Others have used the experience to better their services to dying patients.
References
Lai, X. B., Wong, F. K. Y., & Ching, S. S. Y. (2018). The experience of caring for patients at the end-of-life stage in non-palliative care settings: a qualitative study. BMC palliative care, 17(1), 116.
O’Mara, S. K., & Zborovskaya, Y. (2016). End-of-life care in the Hispanic community. Journal of Hospice & Palliative Nursing , 18 (1), 53-59.
