This Modules content explored the ethical issues surrounding end of life care, which is care for a patient who is either nearing death (diagnosed with a terminal illness), or actively dying.
In his article on Palliative Care: What, Who, When, How?, Robert Twycross states that there are, unfortunately many factors that work against the provision and delivery of palliative care and not only financial ones. There will always be the need to contend with the distaste many health professionals feel when confronted with end-stage disease, and a reluctance to change the focus of care from disease control to comfort. Linked with this is the inability of many professionals to engage sensitively and skillfully in discussions about impending death.
Approaching end of life conversations is a needed skill that both nurses and doctors can develop, as we saw through the documentary “Being Mortal,” on Atul Gawandes experiences.
For your point paper assignment (around 650 words), Id like for you to carefully read the article by Farr Curlin, a palliative medicine specialist who also teaches at Duke University Hospital, and answer the following 5 questions in your paper. The goal of the point paper is to comprehend the distinctions Curlin makes in his article, as a way of identifying the ethical implications of different distinctions in end-of-life care practices.
1. What is sedation, and when is it typically used within the healthcare context?
2. What is sedation as it accompanies patients who are dying? Describe why sedation might occur / under what circumstances, and why this can be ethically problematic.
3. What is the moral difference, as outlined by Curlin, between proportionate palliative sedation PPS and palliative sedation to unconsciousness? PSU
4. Why does this moral difference matter?
5. Curlin asks: Should one relieve suffering by intentionally removing the capacity to suffer, by removing the same capacity of health that makes human experience possible? In other words: should we aim to make a dying patient unconscious so that they no longer experience suffering? He argues that proportionate palliative sedation is an ethically or morally appropriate way to respond to extreme cases of interminable suffering for a dying patient, but not palliative sedation to unconsciousness. Why? Why does Curlin argue that there are ethical limits to how physicians and nurses ought to respond to a patients suffering?
Curlin’s article is attached.
please use other articles as references.
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