Question

Nursing actions when patient can no longer make decisions about his/her own care

Answer 1

Nurses are firmly positioned at the front lines of the healthcare industry, providing skilled care, compassion and comfort for patients and families.

every year on Florence Nightingale’s birthday, featuring many events across the country to honor nurses for the in-the-trenches work they do each and every day to ensure patients and their families are informed and comfortable. All nurses are special, but it takes an extra special person to be a hospice nurse. It’s a grueling, oftentimes sad and many times enlightening job that positions nurses as end of life caregivers for many with terminal disease or old age.

Nurses must be skilled in pain management to ensure their patients remain as comfortable as possible. In addition to disease management, they must also attend to the psychological, interpersonal and spiritual needs of the patient as well. No other professional within the hospice care setting wears quite so many hats as the hospice nurse

Duties of a Hospice Nurse

Hospice nurses focus solely on end-of-life care, providing hands-on nursing care around the clock — either in a facility or in the patient’s home. Not only do they manage pain and other symptoms, they assist in the process of death with dignity,

Hospice nurses do many things during the course of a day, such as:

• Provide respite care for family members who need a break.
• Order appropriate medical supplies needed by the patient.
• Perform patient assessments.
• Create a plan of care for all caregivers to follow.
• Provide sensitive care and emotional support.
• Provide crisis care that alleviates symptoms to result in comfort maintenance.
• Act as mediator between the family and patient, and the rest of the hospice care team.
• Arrange spiritual support services from chaplains, ministers and priests.
• Prescribe medications or treatments, and supervise or manage medical care — in the case of nurse practitioners.
• Be an advocate for patients.

The dying process is often long and bewildering, lonely and painful, often times undignified, and fraught with the unknown. Hospice nurses jump into the fray to provide that meaningful connection and ease the transition from life to death.