Accepting Patients’ End-of-Life Decisions Can Be Hard
“The most important decision an individual can make may be how much treatment they want at the end of life.”
When it comes to end-of-life decisions, it may be hard for a nurse to accept to support only what the patient wants, but it’s also vitally important. In the Viewpoint column in our June issue (Viewpoints are free to read), Nadine Donahue, PhD, RN-BC, CNE, describes caring for an elderly patient in his home as he begins to lose the ability to breathe on his own because of COVID-19.
When she implores the normally spry, physically active retired executive to let her call an ambulance to take him to the ED, he refuses. Writes Donahue, an associate professor of nursing at York College, City University of New York:
“He’d always told me that he believed in a time to be born, a time to live, and a time to die. He was not going to be attached to a ventilator and in a hospital if he could help it.”