Nurse Practitioner’s Role in Palliative Care

Topic 

Nurse Practitioner’s Role in Palliative Care

Instructions 

Write an essay report on Nurse Practitioner’s Role in Palliative Care

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Nurse practitioners (NPs) play an important role helping patients deal with life limiting or threatening illnesses in a discipline called palliative care. Palliative care is a process in which interdisciplinary team-based care is offered to people and their family or surrogates undergoing a life limiting or threatening illness to address their emotional, social, physical, and spiritual need while seeking an improvement of their quality of life through the dying or illness trajectory (Kasl-Godley & King, 2014). Special attention is needed in dealing with life-threatening or terminal illness, with illness controlling and management measures being as important as medication. Palliative care is important because it helps patients and families in making difficult decisions concerning medical and other care provisions in enabling them work towards attaining their goals, particularly in circumstances where the care outcome is uncertain. Palliative care starts from the point of diagnosis of the life threatening or limiting illness, with the process of continued care and preparation for choices in cases of predictable outcome occurs prioritized. NPs help execute palliative care in the most eminent way possible, especially through working together with the patients and their surrogates or families to ensure they make the most appropriate decisions throughout the illness trajectory. NPs’ different roles in ensuring substantial delivery of palliative care to patients with life threatening or limiting illness are the main areas of exploration in this paper.

Word Count: 3000