Evidence Based Practice for Hospice Care

Running head: HOSPICE CARE 1
Evidence Based Practice for Hospice Care
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

HOSPICE CARE 2
Introduction
All across the world, nursing professionals represent the largest group of health care
professionals and play a crucial role in service provisions from the health care sector. Nursing
professionals are a vital resource that helps in ensuring effective and safe health care delivery
to the community. In the special case scenarios of end-of-life situations, the nurses help an
optimization of the quality of life for the patients as well as their family members using
curated measures to prevent, anticipate and treat suffering. Palliative care encompasses the
continuum of suffering including spiritual, emotional, psychosocial, and physical needs of the
terminally ill patients. The following section of the paper will synthesize information
collected from a search of literature conducted to follow the research problem and PICOT
question.
Research Problem
In scenarios of end-of-life situation, family members in addition to the patients, also
suffer, mostly from emotional and mental aspects of health. In grave situations, where the
health of the patient deteriorates to critical levels, the caregivers or the family members of the
patient receiving palliative care may get withdrawn. The nursing professionals have to ensure
proper addressing to this issue, as family members and informal caregivers play a crucial role
during the palliative care of a patient.
PICO Question
Does empowerment and advocacy of the informal caregivers by the nursing
professionals help to increase the participation of informal caregivers in palliative care and
reduce the incidence of withdrawing from care, in comparison to no such interaction between
the nursing professionals and informal caregivers?
Population: Intervention

HOSPICE CARE 3
Nursing Professionals Empowering and advocating
Comparison
No assistance to the informal caregivers
from the nursing professionals
Outcome
Prevention of informal caregivers from
withdrawing from unit of care
Search Strategy
To search for evidence relevant to the PICO question, two databases will be searched,
which are PubMed Central and Cochrane Database. These two are medical databases
containing literature limited to the field and inclusive of nursing practices. A search strategy
protocol will be followed to extract literature containing evidence based practices with the
highest relevancy to the research problem and PICO question. However, as instructed, only
one database, that is PubMed Central is searched for relevant literature. Keywords were input
in the search bar option available in the database, which includes, palliative care, informal
caregivers, empowerment, end-of-life care, hospice care, advocacy, nursing role, nurse,
family, withdrawn, friends and family caregiving. These keywords were searched using
Boolean operators of ‘AND’ and ‘OR’ which were used to increase the search results counts
and first and them to narrow down the result to literature that was most relevant to the
research topic. In addition to search by keywords. Several filters were applied to the
advanced search option available in the database. These included peer-reviewed articles only,
data limit, that is, articles published between 2011- 2020, and language of publishing as
English only. These filters help to increase the recency of the information made available on
the chosen topic, and ensure higher validity and reliability of the research findings from the
study. No geographical limit was set for the advanced search to ensure search results from all
across the globe and to increase the generalisability of the research findings.
In addition to the above-mentioned inclusion and exclusion criteria, the selection of
articles was performed in compliance to the level of evidence, which is determined by the