Nurses duck end of life care discussions
5 October 2010 | By Steve Ford
It is nurses, not patients, who are reluctant to broach discussions about end of life care, a conference was told last week.
Speaking at Nursing Times’ Primary Care Live conference, Liz Clements, community matron for supportive and palliative care in Oxfordshire, said: “Sometimes it is us; we don’t want always to address it with patients.
“Sometimes they do, but we’re not ready to. We don’t want to have that conversation.”
The national end of life care strategy says patients should be enabled to make a decision about their favoured place of death.
But Ms Clements said patients often could not do that because they were not being made aware of the options.
She noted this was sometimes about nurses not having the right communication skills but in other cases it boiled down to their reluctance to broach the issue.
“We need to turn that round and think about if patients have the choice to discuss [where they would like to die] they’re more likely to achieve it,” she said.
A report published two weeks ago by the NHS end of life care programme said most nurses involved in end of life care were not trained in communication beyond a basic level.
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Friday, October 8, 2010
Nurses duck end of life care discussions | News | Nursing Times
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