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End of life care strategies and summary of development essay
End of life care strategies and summary of development essay
Reflection on end of life care
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‘Being Mortal’ was a fascinating read about a young man who grows in the understanding of death and dying and what matters most in the end. We all have constraints and no matter how well we take care of ourselves and live our life, death comes to us all; and how we meet that end can be very different depending on how we want to spend the last moments of our journey. Medical science has its power and pushes the boundaries of life and death, but it can’t always save you, it won’t always work out the way that you hope it does. Doctors like Atul Gawande struggle to fix everyone’s problem and cure the patients who come into the hospital; but as the book progresses Atul finds that there are ways to handle patients’ lives and it doesn’t always involve …show more content…
It’s hard to work with elders who often have over 15 issues and you need to figure out how to make them comfortable and not fix everything. Things like checking the feet and making sure they are cared for, or looking for sores, your job is to help them maintain whatever sort of life they are living and keep them going for the years or months they have left. It’s not a glamorous profession and though most doctors look for ways to do surgery, geriatrics often look for any method but that, due to the …show more content…
Not only people who are unsure about the end of life, but even other doctors who need to open up to their patients about the important issues and how to face them together. People strive to have a great life and how to let people live out their final days should be taken into account. I love the thought of having nursing homes beaming with life and maybe managers and caretakers should take some hints from this book. People need a reason to live, they need a purpose to get out of bed and have a productive day. I know that if we started to show the respect and care that elders need in those final years, we would be able to bring about a society that would fill lives with meaning and purpose. Death is scary, but living a life with no desire or goals is even more frightening. People need to be around others and be social, it’s just who we are. This is a reason that I wouldn’t want to confine this book to a certain cohort or age group; the sooner people start having the hard conversations, the sooner we will grow and create elderly living options that we would be thrilled to join when our time
On the topic of Atul Gawande’s novel Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, an ongoing issue has brought into question what we should do with the elderly and ill that are in need of care. On the one hand, some argue that they should be put in nursing homes and seek treatment for their problems because they can no longer take care of themselves. From this perspective, the elderly have a greater chance of getting injured if they are not taken care of properly, thus are seen as unfit to live on their own. On the other hand, however, others argue that the elderly should be allowed to live on their own as long as they maintain a healthy lifestyle. Atul Gawande, one of this view’s main proponents, urges us to realize that no one is immortal
The PBS Frontline documentary Being Mortal focuses on doctors and their patients who are dealing with chronic illness and nearing the end of their life. It investigates how some doctors are ill-equipped to talk about chronic illness and death with their patients and how this can lead to a lesser quality of life at the end of life stage for patients. In this documentary, we followed Dr. Atul Gawade on his journey to educate himself and others about the difficult emotional aspects of dying. The director, Thomas Jennings, along with Dr. Gawade, created a fantastic documentary about how it is important for doctors to talk to dying patients about their mortality. This was effectively done by offering experiences and interviews from doctors and their patients, by following the declining path of the patient, and by showing the real life emotion of the patients, families and doctors working through to the end.
The sub-title of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ book describes her audience as doctors, nurses, clergy and the family of dying patients. Because of her target audience the book is written on a more emotional level, citing examples of both positive and negative death experiences. There are no detailed descriptions of what happens to the body as it dies, just discussions of how the dying person might feel and how they might want to experience their last moments of life. Sherwin Nuland takes a much more scientific approach with his book “How We Die”. In chapter seven, Accidents, Suicide and Euthanasia, Nuland describes in great detail the pathophysiology of why a person dies from sepsis and pulmonary infection. His book is targeted more towards the health care professional who is familiar with long drawn out discussions of the pathophysiology of a certain disease process. The choice of target audience by each author correlates to their discussions regarding who controls the death experience. Kübler-Ross argues for patient input and control and so...
Atul Gawande’s book, Being Mortal, focuses on end-of-life care for patients in the American healthcare system. Gawande includes evidence along with anecdotes from his own life surrounding his career as a surgeon and his role in helping family members navigate their own end-of-life decisions. Much of Gawande’s argument rests on the premise that while end-of-life care in the American healthcare system is heroic and equipped with the best possible advancements in medicine, it too often fails the patients it is supposed to help. A large part of Being Mortal focuses on the doctor-patient relationship (especially in the context of shared-decision making) and how we often fail to recognize the things that are most important for our elderly in their
Thanks in part to the scientific and technological advances of todays’ society, enhanced medicinal treatment options are helping people battle illnesses and diseases and live longer than ever before. Despite these advances, however, many people with life threatening illnesses have needs and concerns that are unidentified and therefore unmet at the end of life, notes Arnold, Artin, Griffith, Person and Graham (2006, p. 62). They further noted that when these needs and concerns remain unmet, due in part to the failure of providers to correctly evaluate these needs, as well as the patients’ reluctance to discuss them (p. 63, as originally noted by Heaven & Maguire, 1997), a patient’s quality of life may be adversely affected. According to Bosma et al. (2010, p. 84), “Many generalist social work skills regarding counseling, family systems, community resources, and psychosocial assessments are relevant to working with patients and families with terminal illness”, thereby placing social workers in the distinctive position of being able to support and assist clients with end of life decisions and care planning needs. In fact, they further noted that at some point, “most social work practitioners will encounter adults, children, and families who are facing progressive life limiting illness, dying, death, or bereavement” (p. 79).
Differing Functions in Popular Culture It only makes sense that there are countless novels and films focused on the afterlife when we consider the human race 's collective interest in what happens after death. Several popular movies have presented different versions of the afterlife, each with their own purpose. Beetlejuice (1988) tells the story of two individuals who pass away in their home, and must navigate their new existence in the afterlife by reading a book entitled Handbook for the Recently Deceased. In this movie, the two deceased individuals seem to be in an intermediate realm between Earth and the Netherworld (similar to Hell); they are in regular contact with a girl living in their previous home, but they also visit the Netherworld
Modern philosophy stipulates that the will to preserve one’s life as long as possible is a fundamental aspect of basic logic and reason. The will to survive as long as possible is described as an innate and natural instinct of being human. Based on this philosophical reasoning, it is inherently illogical and irrational to willingly put an end to one’s life. Sociologists, psychologists and psychiatrists have also condemned suicide by stating that it is associated with mental, social and physical ill-being and that those who commit suicide are not in a rational state of mind. These scientific and philosophical approaches to suicide have contributed to formally documenting suicide as a wrong, irrational and immoral act. The problem is that these approaches see suicide in a generalized manner and do not take into account sub-types and different kinds of suicide such as euthanasia for example, which is physician-assisted and intentional suicide in the case of a terminally ill patient with no possibility of recovering from his or her medical condition. Technological developments in medicin...
The concept between life and death cannot simply exist without one another, where the topic is widely discussed throughout “When Breath Becomes Air” by Paul Kalanithi. This memoir explores Paul’s definition of death as he passes through the distinct “stages” of his life. As Paul progresses through each stage, he views death differently as he transformed from a student to a neurosurgeon, neurosurgeon to a patient, and eventually becoming a father, where he needed to take full responsibility as an adult.
The end-of-life nurse’s primary objective is to provide comfort and compassion to patients and their families during an extremely difficult time. They must satisfy all “physical, psychological, social, cultural and spiritual needs” of the patient and their family. (Wu & Volker, 2012) The nurse involves their patient in care planning, as well as educating them about the options available. They must follow the wishes of the patient and their family, as provided in the patient’s advance directive if there is one available. It is i...
Death is the one great certainty in life. Some of us will die in ways out of our control, and most of us will be unaware of the moment of death itself. Still, death and dying well can be approached in a healthy way. Understanding that people differ in how they think about death and dying, and respecting those differences, can promote a peaceful death and a healthy manner of dying.
Suicide is a preventable, yet a very serious public health problem. In 2009, more deaths resulted from suicide than from car accidents in the United States. Citation here! In the past, suicide prevention has been more geared towards youths and adolescents. However, recent research has shown an increase in suicide of middle-aged adults and this increase places suicide at the fourth leading cause of death among this age group. Citation here Little is known about midlife suicides, so with that in mind, direct practice workers need an understanding in how to address the needs and concerns of the middle-age group, so that suicide can be prevented.
Death is something that causes fear in many peoples lives. People will typically try to avoid the conversation of death at all cost. The word itself tends to freak people out. The thought of death is far beyond any living person’s grasp. When people that are living think about the concept of death, their minds go to many different places. Death is a thing that causes pain in peoples lives, but can also be a blessing.
There are several methods of achieving immortality, each with its own problems. The first of this methods is to reverse or stop aging, as this is logically one of the main causes of death. In scientific terms this is called biological immortality. A cell or organism that does not age, or stops to age at some point, is biological immortal. Though this seems impossible there are in fact some species which naturally have this ability. An example of this is the Turritopsis nutricula, a jellyfish. Once the jellyfish has become mature it is capable of reversing its aging cycle and to turn itself into a younger version of itself, making it technically immortal.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, suicide is the action of killing oneself intentionally. Causes of suicide can be out of despair. This can be a consequence of several stress factors such as financial difficulties, personal troubles...etc. Work suicide can be caused by the recession; this destroys a very large number of jobs, especially in the telecoms companies because they have a technological revolution. It can also be caused by bad working conditions and frequent unannounced changes in the work environment. Companies need to improve their productivity, which means that employees have to work harder and longer, this can also lead to being “stressed out”.
We as humans, according to Camus, seek meaning. As humans we look for answers in a meaningless universe that yields no such comfort to our questions. Camus says it is absurd to shout into this void for answers. Since there is no such meaning, you as a free agent can choose to find meaning by taking a leap of faith, placing your hopes in a god, or choose to conclude that life is meaningless which results in suicide. Those that judge life as unworthy of living commit suicide. Since there is no such meaning, you as a free agent can choose to find meaning by taking a leap of faith, placing your hopes in a god, or choose to conclude that life is meaningless which results in suicide. Is suicide always the result of a