New guidelines around end-of-life care
The care that nurses provide to clients who are dying is the same as the care they provide in any other situation. What sets end-of-life care apart is the circumstance in which care is given – it is often an especially sensitive period for clients and their families.
To help nurses guide their clients in making decisions about care at the end of their lives, the College has developed a new practice document. Guiding Decisions About End-of-Life Care replaces Resuscitation, Revised 1999, which focused on the single procedure of resuscitation. The new document relates to more than just resuscitation by accounting for the fact that end-of-life care is guided by the wishes that clients express about treatment. As a result, its aim is to guide nurses’ practice on end-of-life care issues such as client’s wishes, consent, treatment plans, advance directives, substitute decision-makers and relevant legislation.
The content of the new document emerged from feedback provided by members of the Outreach Program’s Advisory Groups and randomly selected nurses from across the province. The result is an updated document that is relevant to current nursing practice and can be applied by nurses in all practice settings.
For more information on this document, see the Winter 2009 issue of The Standard, or download Guiding Decisions About End-of-Life Care.