Palliative care in the homecare setting

Abstract

This literature reviewed research was aiming at capturing the actual or predominant roles nurses play within the home care setting when caring for the terminally ill. The intended purpose is to summarize and produce evidence-based knowledge on the role that nurses play while taking care of the terminally ill patient. The design of the study utilizes three main electronic database search engines: Science Direct, EBSCO (academic search elite), and Saga journal. The authors used systematic inductive content analysis to analyze the 20 articles, that they retrieved from the database mentioned above. The study done prioritized the primary goal of our research, which was to get to know the actual role nurses play in palliative homecare.

We used the Humanistic nursing theory (HNT) as our theoretical framework. Each of the 20 articles addresses the nurse’s role in palliative home care in their own way. The most predominant role which was addressed in most of the articles was Availability/Present while performing the basic tenet of nursing, Symptoms management (pain management inclusive), Patient Autonomy, and the spider in a web role. Among these four significant roles, Availability/Present, while performing the basic tenet of a nurse, was found to be superior, for most articles addressed it quite often and as many times compared to the other three roles. Symptoms management was second while spiders in the web role and patient Autonomy followed, respectively. The study found that caring for the critically ill requires training/education, which is lacking in most Finnish university nursing curriculum. Thus, the authors recommend that nursing programs in universities should incorporate palliative care in their plans, for it will go a long way to get nurses much more prepared in this field of work.