Palliative Care and End of Life Wishes

Photo by Georg Arthur Pflueger on Unsplash

In the not too distant past, you could go to a hospital and find someone who was dying in a hospital room at the end of the hall with the door closed. While the patient would receive necessary care, the real message was that we shouldn’t discuss dying. In fact, health professionals often let family members decide whether or not to tell a loved one that he or she was dying. As a result, some people experienced horrible, lonely deaths. But this scenario has changed, though more needs to be done to ensure that people’s end of life wishes are respected and supported. Palliative care is a specialty that focuses on symptom management and people are urged to declare someone as their health care proxy to make decisions, if the person is unable to make decisions for themselves.

So what happens when you are in a long-term care facility, such as a nursing home? Dr. Diana Mason, RN, producer and host of HealthCetera in the Catskills, talked about this with Dr. Joan Carpenter, RN, an expert in geriatric palliative care. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing, a Health Scientist at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, and a nurse practitioner with Coastal Hospice and Palliative Care. Her research focuses on the implementation and evaluation of non-pharmacologic palliative care interventions for people living with serious illness and their care partners.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:31 — 48.9MB)

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Photo by Georg Arthur Pflueger on Unsplash In