Holistic Nursing Care in Palliative Care

Running head: PALLIATIVE CARE
Palliative Care
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

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Palliative Care
Holistic nursing care implies a situation where nursing practice has the goal of
treating the whole person (Pratt and Wood, 2015). It focuses on the whole aspects of human
life rather than limiting itself to the physical care. In such care, the social, psychological,
spiritual and physical aspects are put into consideration. Holistic care is paramount in
palliative care if the best outcome is to be achieved. As a health care provider, the nurse has
their own beliefs and value system. They are likely to interact with persons with beliefs and
value systems that are very different from their own while offering palliative care. At such
times, what is the best thing to do? What are the best practices to offer end of life care? Why
is it important to focus on caring for the whole person rather than focusing on the physical
alone? This essay answers these questions in an attempt of explaining the best possible
palliative care practices.
According to Alliance and World Health Organization (2014), holistic nursing care
focuses on healing the mind, soul and body of the patient. It involves contemplating about
and assisting the patient recover from effects of illness on the body, emotions, mind,
spirituality, personal relationships that they had or have and their religion. In addition to
these, holistic care also puts to consideration the cultural and social differences and
preferences. Each person on the universe is unique in their own ways and it is only fair then
that holistic care be individualized for every patient. Holistic care goes more than saying
several words to a patient. It is a philosophy. It is a kind of care that ensures ever part of the
patient is taken care of. Patients receiving palliative care refer to holistic nurses as those
nurses who truly care. As observed by Australia (2005), while there is absolutely nothing
wrong with care that is goal oriented, it may leave the patient feeling like they are just but a
number, or a diagnosis, or even worse a burden. The nurse finds themselves in a challenging
condition while offering palliative care. Here is how this happens. The nurse may have too

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many patients to care for and more often time is not enough. In addition to dealing with the
patients, they also deal with the family members which further makes the situation more
challenging considering that time is limited. As a nurse, the whole experience could be
draining and tiresome. Wiener, Weaver, Bell and Sansom (2015) suggests that one way for a
nurse to overcome these experiences and to achieve higher levels of success, is to adopt
holistic care. The key thing when it comes to holistic care ceases to be the amount of time
that you spend with a patient. Rather, it is how you spend the time that is available. Nurses
should strive to use the little time that they have with their patients to make the most out of it.
When this happens, better patient outcomes are achieved and potentially increases the
happiness of the nurse due to success in their work. There are numerous more ways to
improve the nurse-patient relationship and promote care that aims a healthy emotional,
spiritual and psychological environment. Some of these are going to be discussed next.
Offering palliative care is not as complex as it might seem. To succeed in offering
holistic care in limited time that a nurse has, they can employ some techniques. Most of these
are easy and straight forward but their effects are great and impactful. Learning the name
patient’s name and referring them by it is one of these techniques. According to Brant (2017),
it feels good when one is referred by their own names and it creates the perception that the
nurse cares and that the patient is important. This goes a long way in boosting the self-esteem
of the patient. When this happens even the chances of physical wellbeing improves. Another
technique is to maintain a good and strong eye contact. It gives the patient the impression that
they are being listened to which is the case (Morton, Fontaine, Hudak and Gallo, 2017).
When patients have a listening ear, they feel cared for. Psychologically, they improve, and
the improvement may manifest in other areas (emotional, physical) as well. Some other
technique is asking the patient how they are feeling and sincerely caring. This has the same
effects as those explained above, that is maintaining eye contact.