Palliative Care, Case Study of New Zealand

Running Head: PALLIATIVE CARE, CASE STUDY OF NEW ZEALAND 1
Palliative Care, Case Study of New Zealand
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PALLIATIVE CARE, CASE STUDY OF NEW ZEALAND 2
Palliative Care, Case Study of New Zealand
No matter the person’s background, stability or who they are, there comes a time when
they eventually face death or an inevitable condition which leads to their death. When such times
come, managing the condition is very important because it extends the victims life. This service
is provided through palliative or the end of life care. Under palliative care, victims are provided
with dignified and humane services which prolong their lives as they approach their end days.
This care is very essential because it optimizes the victim’s quality of life before death by
looking into their physical, cultural, spiritual, and psychological requirements. It also supports
the victim’s family members and the caregivers as a preparation to embrace the situation
(Dempers & Gott, 2017). New Zealand has been ranked third best place to die in the whole
world, just behind Australia and the United States. The reflection was based on the level of
public awareness about death, availability of palliative care and the quality of care which is
available for people facing the end of life conditions.
Among the five aspects of Palliative care in New Zealand: providing pain relief and other
distressing symptoms, encouraging the victim that death is normal, hastening and postponing
death, integrating spiritual and psychological aspects of patient care and supporting the victims
to live enthusiastically until death; relieving pain and other troubling symptoms has proved to
contribute significantly towards the client quality of life and that of dying (Frey, Boyd, Foster,
Robinson & Gott, 2016).
Pain is among the common symptoms reported by palliative patients. According to the
International Association for the Study of Pain, the pain has been defined as the unpleasant
emotions and sensory experiences which are associated with the potential or actual tissue

PALLIATIVE CARE, CASE STUDY OF NEW ZEALAND 3
damage (Wilson, Oliver & Malpas, 2019). The pathophysiology of pain has remained a mystery,
and although it has helped classify pain as either neuropathic or nociceptive to guide its
management, the reality is that pain is a syndrome with nociceptive, psychosocial, neuropathic
and emotional overlays. The causes of pain are often multifactorial because they involve
diseases, their treatments, previous experiences and pre-existing morbidities (Lee, Ranse,
Silvester, Mehta & Van Haren, 2018).
For most of the palliative patients, the pain they undergo during their end days combined
with the distress when they realize that they are living their end days usually worsen their health
conditions. For parents, they are filled with worry and stress when they imagine living their
children as orphans. The pain undergone by these patients tends to deter the proper functioning
of their body immune systems (McLeod, 2016). Subsequently, when the pain is too high, it
makes it hard for the patients to fulfill the basic needs of their bodies like eating. Providing pain
relief and other distressing symptoms is therefore very important because it prevents the patients
from undergoing these conditions.
In New Zealand, there are a number of legal directives and ethical codes of conduct
which have been put in place to regulate and manage palliative care. Some of the key areas under
the two categories touch on planning the care, palliative sedation, cardiopulmonary resuscitation,
doctrine of double effect, assisted dying and withholding and withdrawing treatment (Oliver,
Wilson & Malpas, 2017). I would consider withholding and withdrawing treatment, assisted
dying and palliative sedation when advising health professionals who interact with palliative
patients and their families seeking options to manage the quality of dying.