Four-Point Strategy Guide for Registered Nurses in Palliative Care


Palliative care is about preventing and relieving the suffering and improving the quality of life for people having serious and complicated health condition. These patients required needed attention and delicate care to make sure that their illness or disease won’t get worse or complicated.

1. Setting Routine Nursing Procedures

The most effective registered nurses in palliative care are the ones who are best-supported because proper training and development of routine procedures allow them to make the right decisions when providing the appropriate treatment. Nurses can get all the support that they need when they are given the opportunity to have the needed physician consultations.

Many hospitals and medical centers allow nurses to interact with physicians on a regular basis. Weekly interdisciplinary meeting may help strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration and coordination. In these meetings, both nurses and physicians can talk about strategies, share information, and solve problems that each member encounters. In this case, a palliative care physician should be on call at any moment.

Trained nurses that specialize in palliative nursing use their palliative care techniques to treat dsypnea, anxiety, or pain so that they will be able to respond to the patients’ needs. Patients get their needed treatments immediately without the need to wait for the doctor to respond thereby getting positive outcomes immediately.

2. Be Flexible and Responsive to Patient Need

Good palliative nursing procedures are not enough to make sure a good patient care standard. Nurses should understand that even taking an effort to understand a patient’s goals of care can be complex and time consuming. Instead, nurses should keep their focus on and set the patient’s goals of care.

The nursing unit or palliative care service should set guidelines that are not hard or fast rules. These guidelines may include the following:

* Overnight visits by children should not be allowed because you wouldn’t want children to sleep with the patient that died the following day.

* Make an exception to the rule by making sure the extubation is still supporting the patient before he/she is transferred to the ward. This will give time to the family and loved ones to see the patient before anything serious may happen.

3. Provide a Broader Continuum of Care

The nursing unit should think outside of the box when providing a good palliative nursing care plan for the patient. This where education of the patients and their families come into play so that they will know what options that they have to take.

4. Build Nursing Support to Prevent Work Burnout

If a palliative nursing team is not properly organized then many registered may get work burnout thereby affecting the quality and continuity of palliative care. Having the adequate staff and a talented interdisciplinary staff with a high degree of collaboration can prevent burnout. In this way, the pressure will be alleviated and the nurses can now work effectively and efficiently.

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