In the reading “Caring for the dying: my patients, my work, my faith”, Mary Lee Freeman is a nurse practitioner who works at the hospice center. Hospice center provides compassionate care for people in the last phases of an incurable disease so that they may live as fully and comfortably as possible. In the article, every time she arrives at the hospice center, she would look at the “white board” to check if there are new patients admitted to the center and if any patients died while she was off-duty. After reading this section, it reminded me that nurses will encounter a lot of unexpected deaths of their patients. Grief is common among nurses and is often heartfelt when patients die because they have provided emotional support to patients …show more content…
Sometimes, the dying patients just need someone to talk to and someone to listen. Therefore, the nurses from hospice assist the patients with the emotional, psychosocial and spiritual aspects of dying. After receiving care from the hospice nurses, the patients would feel that they are dying with dignity. The nurses from hospice will also provide counseling to the patients’ family and friends, so they can overcome the grief faster. However, sometimes health care providers are very focused on curing the patients that they would forget to humanely care about the patients’ emotion. For example, the health care provider performed Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on the patient who already signed the DNR (Do not resuscitate) form. The health care provider was insensitive toward his or her patient. In my future clinical practice, if I see any health care providers that are insensitive to their patients, I would definitely speak up in order to reduce this ethical issue. If I failed to speak up, more health care providers would make mistakes and there would be a decrease in the quality of health care. In addition, I will also notify this ethical issue to my co-workers in my future clinical practice, so they can be aware and decrease the occurrence of