Supporting Significant Life Events

Supporting Significant Life Events
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AC1.1 Impact of the significant life event: Main goal of medical and nursing services is to
avoid death of an ill patient. Death has impact on patients, family members and friends. Few
of the studies established that death and bereavement impact health care providers; however,
it would not produce significant impact on the healthcare providers. However, dying person
like Mrs Garry would experience whether it would be good or bad death. In case of Gary, it
was evident that she was experiencing bad death. Prior to death she was experiencing lot of
pain and sufferings. Moreover, she was not getting emotional support because her son was
away from her. Her son joined her at the end of her life. Her son, George was most
vulnerable due to her death. He was emotionally disturbed and confused. He was not able to
decide whether he need to take care of his mother or he need to look after his family
(Gallagher and Krawczyk, 2013).
He was stressful and frightened because he was not having prior experience of dying person.
However, he should accept death of his mother and should carry out all the activities
necessary after her death. Death of Garry would produce significant long-term impact on
George. It would produce depression in him. It would not affect his personal life but also
affects his professional life (Burge et al., 2014). He went to hospital to take car e of his
mother by taking leave from his job. It would impact on his financial condition because he is
the only earning person in their family. George would get separated from his mother after her
death and it would be the most significant personal loss for him. Traumatic experience of the
Garry’s death on George would be persistent grieving process and disruptive yearning. Other
people who worked with George would also feel empty in their life because during her
working days she had good association with people around her (Kentish-Barnes et al., 2016).
AC1.2 Palliative and community responses: Professionals working in the palliative care
would use their personal and professional experience during the bereavement of Garry.
Palliative care professionals experienced meaning of death and bereavement more
purposefully. Palliative care professionals need to give more attention to the care of Garry
and they also should give moral support to George. However, it was evident that these people
were not bothering about the condition of the Garry and George because they were too busy
with other work. This act of care providers was not according to ethics; however, these
people understood that Garry was going to die and they were helpless. In reality, palliative
care people need to invest more amount of time in supporting family members of Garry.
Moreover, they also should work towards building community capability, capacity and
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recommendations for taking care of both Garry and George and supporting them (Moon,
2013).
Palliative care people need to provide care to Garry and George according their needs and
requirements. It can be either exaggerated or less. Provision of palliative care without
considering needs and requirements of bereavement people like Garry, would be neither
effective nor affordable (Thomas, 2014). Palliative care people need to perform assessment of
Garry by implementing multiple approaches and they need to discuss with multiple
professionals. They need to use both subjective opinion of care providers and validated
screening tools for risk assessments in Garry. It would be helpful in understanding accurate
health condition of Garry. Hence, they could plan her care accordingly. Community people
like her friends and relatives need to extend helping hands for Garry because in the initial
period of her admission to the hospital her son was not there to take care of her. Help from
the community people is necessary because palliative care providers also need assistant and
support from the people who knows Garry. Palliative care persons and community people
need to work together to provide moral and emotional support to George. It would be helpful
for George to get rid of his grief and to fulfil her last wishes (Abel and Kellehear, 2018).
AC1.3 Impact on health and social care workers: Healthcare and nursing professionals need
to be emotionally strong to provide care to terminally ill patient like Garry. Moreover, they
should give moral and emotional support for Garry and George. It is difficult to provide care
to terminally ill people because these people might not respond to treatment and these people
might not be willing to take treatment. Hence, healthcare providers need to be more skilful to
provide care to these people. It would be beneficial to give training to healthcare
professionals, those working for terminally ill patients. It is evident that training to healthcare
professionals in medical and social aspects of care proved more successful in providing care
to people like Garry. If healthcare professionals provide care to patients like Garry only for
medical conditions; it would be difficult to control mental and psychological deterioration of
patient (Davis et al., 2015).
Development of psychological and mental illness in patients not only exaggerate
deterioration of health condition of patient but also potentiate grief in family members like
George. Healthcare professionals need to recognise and accept bereavement condition of
Garry and should take responsibility to inform George about her exact current health
condition. It would be helpful in establishing open communication among George and
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healthcare professionals. Hence, George would freely discus with healthcare professionals
about his mother’s condition and he would be ready to accept it and be prepared for her loss.
Healthcare and social workers need to consider social and cultural aspects of Garry to
establish relationship with Garry and George. It would be helpful in understanding sensitivity
of patient and family members and to provide emotional support to them (Price et al., 2013).
Healthcare professionals can only help terminally ill patients in coping of their grief because
health of such patients get deteriorated in such a way that it is difficult to reverse it. Hence,
genuineness, professional competence and consideration for the patient are necessary for
healthcare professionals. Since, different types of professionals are involved in the care of
terminally ill patients’, coordination and cooperation among all these professionals are of
prime importance (Simpson, 2012).
AC2.1 Organisational policies and procedures :
Organisational policies and procedures should be well established for giving support to
terminally ill patients. From the given case study, it is evident that, there is no established
policies and procedures for taking care of Garry. If there would have been effective policies
and procedures, in this organisation, suffering to Garry and George would have been
minimized. Mutual support approach is one of the well-established methods for providing
care to bereavement like Garry. This method would have been more successful in case of
Garry because in this method support to the bereavement people usually provided by
laypeople in the community. This type of support is necessary in case of Garry because in the
initial period of her hospitalisation there was nobody to take of her. However, according to
organisation policies, most of the organisations are reluctant to implement this model for
providing care to people like Garry (Friedrichs et al., 2014).
Organisations need to implement policies and procedures to provide diverse types of
interventions. Established procedures for different types of interventions would be helpful in
providing more effective care to patient and family members. Medication, psychological and
social intervention would have been more effective to Garry and George. With medication,
her deteriorating condition would have extended for certain more duration. Psychological
intervention to both Garry and George would have helped them to get psychological stability
and minimize the chances of depression and anxiety in case of George (Hudson et al., 2018).
Social intervention would have been more effective for both Garry and George. Social
network would have helped Garry to arrange social workers to spend with her when she was
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