Personal Beliefs and Values to End of Life Care

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Personal Beliefs and Values to End of Life Care
Palliative care is an essential medical and nursing care for improving quality of life of persons
with life-limiting illness. Palliative care refers to a specialized nursing and medical care for
patients with life limiting health conditions (Glaser, & Strauss, 2017). The palliative care
provides relief to patients that improve their quality of life. Palliative care has a role in relieving
patients’ suffering and their families through a holistic assessment and treatment of psychosocial,
physical, and spiritual symptoms. Personal values and beliefs shape palliative care provider
interactions that are important to delivering effective palliative care. The following essay a self
reflection that explains how to provide best holistic end of life care to a person while managing
personal values and beliefs and their effect to interaction with a patient.
Holistic end of life care is a comprehensive approach for assessing and treating persons in their
last days of living. A holistic approach aims at assessing and treating the physical, spiritual, and
psychosocial aspect of a palliative patient. The approach recognizes that patients are human
beings and are made up of mind, body and the spirit. Balboni et al. (2016) defined holistic end of
life care as a comprehensive care that acknowledges and recognizes a person as a whole and
there exist interdependency among one’s social, psychological, biological, and spiritual aspects.
A holistic care approach has to include medication, communication, self-help, education and
complimentary treatment (Morton, Fontaine, Hudak, & Gallo, 2017). The approach considers all
the aspects that affect the treatment process and the patient’s emotions, thoughts, opinion,
attitude and cultures. The holistic end of life care approach is based on equality, relative
openness, respect, mutuality as the patient under care is allowed to participate in decision
making.
The holistic end of life care has several benefits to palliative care providers, patients, and their
families. First, holistic approach increases the nurses understanding of the patient physical illness
and their specific needs. The holistic approach is comprehensive and involves educating patients
to increase their self awareness. The patients are able to understand their condition and its effects
that enable nurses to get a clear inquiry of the patient’s suffering (Gillan, Van der Riet, & Jeong,
2014). Secondly, the holistic care approach enables communication between the nurse and the
patient. Communication is important to creating therapeutic relationship in palliative care
(Balboni et al. 2016). The therapeutic relationship between the nurse and the patient enable the