Palliative Care Practice: Reflective Report on Patient Death

This report presents a reflective analysis of a student's experience in a palliative care setting, specifically focusing on the death of a patient. The student utilizes Gibbs' reflective cycle to explore the event, feelings, evaluation, and action plan. The report describes the event of finding an unresponsive patient, the emotional distress and frustration experienced, and the subsequent reflection on the incident. The student evaluates the situation, considering the importance of palliative care and the need for preparedness in dealing with patient deaths. The action plan involves seeking further training to better cope with such situations and improve the delivery of holistic care. The report concludes with a commitment to continuous reflection for enhanced nursing skills. The report also mentions the importance of nurse staffing, work environments, and education on patient mortality, the code of conduct for inclusion and diversity, and the understanding of compassion satisfaction, compassion fatigue and burnout.

Running Head: PALLIATIVE CARE PRACTICE
Palliative Care Practice
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1PALLIATIVE CARE PRACTICE
The essay is to reflect on the personal experience with death and dying at palliative care
ward in X hospital. Gibbs’s Reflective cycle model is used for this purpose. The cycle comprises
of “description of the event, analysis of feelings, evaluation, and an action plan to prepare if the
situation arose again” (Gibbs, 1988).
During an evening shift, observation round for all the patients, when I reached the room
number 10, there was no reply from 82-year-old male. As I found him unconscious with no
pulse, I depressed the emergency room bottom staff alert the nursing staff. This is the first event
of death that I encountered in palliative care.
When I analyzed my feelings, I was frustrated, and emotionally broken on failing to save
patient. One of senior nurse staff told me that it was inappropriate to pull all the staff to attend
the emergency call. She instructed me to depress only the room call button of the patient.
However, I felt that my behavior did not breach the code of conduct as per nursing council of
New Zealand. I respected the patient’s rights in life and death (Schmidt et al., 2017).
As I evaluated my feelings, I realized that my feelings were part of the patient care in
dying stage. It was integral part of palliative care (Slocum-Gori et al., 2013). I realized that I
need to be more prepared for death. A solid training may help me cope up better next time and
avoid such stressor as also highlighted by Cho et al., (2015). Therefore, my action plan in future
would demonstrate a better understanding of patient death and realization that instructions of
mentors or strong preceptors do have positive implications for nurses to cop up with patient
death and stress. I am looking forward to patient death education to be able to deliver high
quality holistic care.

2PALLIATIVE CARE PRACTICE
In conclusion, I will continue to engage in reflection process to improve my nursing skills
by exploring and evaluating all previous clinical experiences.

3PALLIATIVE CARE PRACTICE
References
Cho, E., Sloane, D. M., Kim, E. Y., Kim, S., Choi, M., Yoo, I. Y., ... & Aiken, L. H. (2015).
Effects of nurse staffing, work environments, and education on patient mortality: an
observational study. International journal of nursing studies, 52(2), 535-542.
Gibbs, G. (1988). The reflective cycle. Kitchen S (1999) An appraisal of methods of reflection
and clinical supervision. Br J Theatre Nurs, 9(7), 313-7.
Schmidt, B. J., MacWilliams, B. R., & Neal-Boylan, L. (2017). Becoming Inclusive: A Code of
Conduct for Inclusion and Diversity. Journal of Professional Nursing, 33(2), 102-107.
Slocum-Gori, S., Hemsworth, D., Chan, W. W., Carson, A., & Kazanjian, A. (2013).
Understanding compassion satisfaction, compassion fatigue and burnout: A survey of the
hospice palliative care workforce. Palliative Medicine, 27(2), 172-178.