Nursing Care

Your Hospice nurse may become the very best friend you have as you or your loved one face the challenges surrounding end-of-life. The hospice nurse performs many traditional nursing duties such as observing, assessing, and recording symptoms. Hospice and palliative care nurses work in collaboration with other health providers (such as physicians, social workers, or chaplains) within the context of an interdisciplinary team. Composed of highly qualified, specially trained professionals and volunteers, the team blends their strengths together to anticipate and meet the needs of the patient and family facing terminal illness and bereavement.

Hospice nurses have a particularly tough job because, from the outset, they know that the patient they are caring for is terminally ill. Hospice and palliative nurses distinguish themselves from their colleagues in other nursing specialty practices by their unwavering focus on end-of-life care. Hospice and palliative care includes 24-hour nursing availability, management of pain and other symptoms, and family support. By providing expert management of pain and other symptoms combined with compassionate listening and counseling skills, the hospice nurse promotes the highest quality of life for the patient and family. Regardless of the setting, hospice and palliative nurses strive to achieve an understanding of specific end -of-life issues from the perspective of each patient and his or her family. The hospice doctrine states that terminally ill patients have the right to spend their last days in the comfort of their own homes, with their families. To accomplish this, nurses collaborate in a cultural assessment of the patient and family and provide culturally sensitive care.

Because they essentially act as home care nurses and spend several hours a day with their patients in their homes, they often become emotional caretakers as well. In addition to coordinating the care of every hospice patient through an advising physician, providing direct patient care, and evaluating the patient's condition, they serve as an advocate for the wishes of the patient as it relates to end-of-life matters and quality of life.

As society's needs change and awareness of the issues surrounding the end of life increase, nurses are called to advocate for the terminally ill. The expertise and compassion of the hospice nurse is a rare commodity that has earned them the respect and admiration of their peers and the families they serve.