Holistic Palliative Care: Managing Personal Beliefs and Values

This article discusses holistic palliative care and its aim to improve the quality of life of terminally ill patients. It also explores how personal beliefs and values can affect the nurse-patient relationship and offers ways to manage them for effective care. The subject is palliative care, and the course code, course name, and college/university are not mentioned.

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

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Palliative care
Palliative care is offered to persons who have a terminal illness. It aims at improving
the quality of life of the patients. (Australia, 2005). Its role is to offer comprehensive care
which puts in to consideration all the facets of human life, i.e., physical, social, emotional and
spiritual. It aims at treating symptoms of the four areas of life just mentioned. It may include
services such as relieving pain and other symptoms, support for people to meet cultural
obligation and links to other services such as home help and financial success. As indicated
by Pratt and Wood (2015), palliative care is offered to any individual, regardless of age and
gender, who has been diagnosed with a condition that cannot be treated. It could be provided
at home, at the hospital, in a hospice or in a residential aged facility (Duckett and Willcox,
2015). Among the health care team involved in offering palliative care, is a nurse. Every
nurse has their own personal values and belief that significantly dictate their world view and
interaction with patients. Personal beliefs could negatively affect nurse-patient relationship if
not monitored. In this essay, holistic palliative care is going to be identified and explained.
Additionally, the essay is going to outline some ways of managing personal values and
beliefs and explain how personal beliefs affect the interaction between a nurse and the
patient.
Holistic palliative care focuses on wholesome care rather than just physical care.
According to World Health Organization (2014), palliative care that is holistic aims at
improving life’s quality of both the patients and caregivers through preventing and relieving
suffering and treating other problem, physical, psychosocial and spiritual. This kind of care is
guided by the great wealth of knowledge that other areas of life such as the cultural or
spiritual may have some implications on the physical wellbeing. To effectively treat and
support a palliative patient, it is important that all these areas be looked at. As demonstrated
by Wiener, Weaver, Bell and Sansom (2015), this greatly improves the quality of care and

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longevity of the person involved. To understand the significance of the wholesome/holistic
approach, we illustrate using an example. Following is the example. Research has
demonstrated that the cultural and spiritual beliefs of patients significantly guide their
decisions, including those that pertain to health. Therefore, it is important to discuss with the
patient about their spiritual, cultural or other beliefs that have the potential of interfering with
optimal care. It follows also, that a nurse need be more objective and acceptive when offering
care so as not to create any barriers to effective care. Since the main aim of holistic care is to
treat the patient wholesomely, the nurse should sometimes put their beliefs at bay if it is for
the better of care.
Each person on the universe is unique in their own ways. For this reason, one can
conclude that it is only fair that palliative care be individualized for each patient. We have
seen above that palliative care aims at healing the body, the soul and the mind. Offering
holistic palliative care greatly improves the life of a patient. Studies have reported that
patients refer to nurses who offer holistic care as those nurses who truly care. Considering the
role of a nurse, it might seem overwhelming to offer such kind of care. When you consider
that the nurse must deal with several patients, their care givers and that the time is limited,
holistic palliative care may seem like a goal that cannot be accomplished. As a nurse
therefore, the whole experience could be draining and tiresome. To the relief of the nurse,
extensive research has demonstrated that what is important may not be the amount of time
that is available but how the nurse spends the time that is available (Brant, 2017). The focus
should be striving to make the most out of the available time. This has the potential of
improving outcomes leading to happier patients. Nurses would also be happier since it would
be a sign of success on their work. Numerous ways in which a nurse can make the best out of
the time available with a client have been developed. These are very simple activities such as
smiling at the patient and calling them by their names.

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Nurses too, like all other human beings have their own personal value systems and
beliefs. They hail from different cultural and spiritual backgrounds and have different world
views. Personal value systems and beliefs inevitably affect how we do what we do and how
we relate with other people (Kelley and Morrison, 2015). Take for instance a nurse who has a
definition of what dressing and being modest is like. If they come across a patient who
dresses otherwise, they might judge the patients as being immodest. To avoid conflicting with
patients over issues that are not medical related, nurses should endeavour to be more
objective and acceptive (Murray et al, 2017). Someone who has these characteristics
(objective and acceptive) is likely to accommodate other people’s beliefs, cultures and world
view rather than viewing theirs as the supreme. This would greatly help since the nurse is
likely to meet many people all with different beliefs and value systems. The best thing would
be working on one’s mind and appreciating others and their cultures rather than judging
them.
The beliefs that a nurse has could affect relationship with a client immensely. For
instance, it is necessary to establish a helping relationship between the nurse and the client.
Where the nurse’s beliefs conflict with those of the patient, this relationship is not likely to be
successful (Stoddart and Evans, 2017). In some instances, the nurse could try to influence the
patient to adopt a different belief. This is likely to be met by resistance from the patient which
may negatively affect the helping relationship. In addition to negatively affecting the helping
relationships it might establish communication barriers. This implies a situation where the
nurse interacts with the patient subjectively rather than objectively because of how they know
them. Beliefs could also lead to bias where the nurse becomes fonder of some patients than
others. Most of these beliefs are subjective and have negative consequences. beliefs could
also have positive effects. For instance, a nurse who believes that all people are equal, and

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none should be favoured over the other is likely to maintain objectivity when dealing with
patients.
In conclusion, palliative care aims at improving the quality of life of the terminally ill.
For palliative care to achieve the above-mentioned purpose, it should ensure that the whole
person rather than just the physical is taken care of. Holistic care leads to improved life
quality and even longer life. Like other people, nurses have personal beliefs. Care should be
taken to avoid conflict with patients over personal beliefs. For this to be realized, the nurse
should be sure to employ objectivity and be more acceptive.

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References
Australia, P. C. (2005). Standards for providing quality palliative care for all Australians. Palliative
Care Australia.
Alliance, W. P. C., & World Health Organization. (2014). Global atlas of palliative care at the end of
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Pratt, M., & Wood, M. (2015). Art therapy in palliative care: The creative response. Routledge.
Wiener, L., Weaver, M. S., Bell, C. J., & Sansom-Daly, U. M. (2015). Threading the cloak: palliative
care education for care providers of adolescents and young adults with cancer. Clinical
oncology in adolescents and young adults, 5, 1.
Kelley, A. S., & Morrison, R. S. (2015). Palliative care for the seriously ill. New England Journal of
Medicine, 373(8), 747-755.
Morton, P. G., Fontaine, D., Hudak, C. M., & Gallo, B. M. (2017). Critical care nursing: a holistic
approach (p. 1056). Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
Murray, S. A., Kendall, M., Mitchell, G., Moine, S., Amblàs-Novellas, J., & Boyd, K. (2017).
Palliative care from diagnosis to death. BMJ: British Medical Journal (Online), 356.
Brant, J. M. (2017). Holistic total pain manage-ment in palliative care: Cultural and global
considerations. Palliat Med Hosp Care Open J.
Stoddart, G. L., & Evans, R. G. (2017). Producing health, consuming health care. In Why are
some people healthy and others not? (pp. 27-64). Routledge.
Duckett, S., & Willcox, S. (2015). The Australian health care system (No. Ed. 5). Oxford
University Press.

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