cancer care

This author’s personal perceptions concerning patients facing a lingering terminal illness, have been shaped by over 20 years of critical care nursing experience. Facing death and illness on a daily basis requires self-examination and a high degree of comfort with one’s own mortality, limits and values. Constant exposure to the fragility of life forces respect for the whole person and the people who love them. A general approach to patients who are actively dying is to allow them to define what they want and need during this time. The nurse’s role

3. Nurse will discuss patient’s home environment and relationships with others outside of the hospital setting. Discussing her feelings about her life and relationships with others could help to identify the reasoning for her harm to help prevent it from happening again. Collaborating with the patient to help recognize the problem gives a better understanding of the situation and provides a sense of trust between the nurse and

On one of the placement on the ward, the student nurse was assigned to assist a patient. Alfred is a 65 years old man and was admitted with diarrhoea and generally unwell to the hospital. In the process of his admission he was isolated in a side room to prevent and reduce any risk of spreading infection. Alfred was a barrier nursed because he had clostridium difficile. He was isolated to lessen the hazard of spread of infections to other patients, visitors, and

It is no secret that communication is key when providing direct patient care in a skilled nursing facility. However, there is a noticeable lapse in the communication between the care team when providing care to the individual or groups of individuals. Two main parts of any care team are the registered nurse and the certified nursing assistant, as these are the two people whom have the most direct and impactful roles with residents in a skilled facility. The Registered Nurse and the Certified Nursing Assistant play similar roles in providing patient care, but have different roles in its entirety. The role of the Registered Nurse (RN) is defined as having the competency and skill to provide direct and indirect health care to individuals, their families, and communities around them. Services are also provided designed to give out medications, to promote comfort or healing, promote healing, and to also provide the dignity of their patients and patient’s families (American College of Rheumatology, 2015).

Giving myself time to read up on nursing experiences, attending more clinical practice labs, participating and watching these duties in the health care setting will allow me to develop a secure level of confidence the next time that this type of situation may occur. Staying in the room allowed me to experience the feeling of support while looking past social norms and how they are challenged. I met my personal values, and I believe that one should respect another person`s privacy. This understanding allowed me to be there to support the resident during her time of need. In the article `starting out` by Jane Schulz, a nursing student shares her experience of helping her colleague assist an elderly patient with daily care. Observing the compassion and care between nurse and patient from fundamental tasks, she took away a valued lesson of how our support and caring methods affect an individual. My relation to this story allowed me to reflect on the effects my care and supporting actions had on our patient.

According to Allen et al. (2012), “millions of people with chronic illnesses endure unrelieved pain, uncontrolled physical symptoms and unresolved psychosocial or spiritual problems.” This issue occurs because palliative care is often considered a form of end-of-life care. Palliative care is a treatment that can be used for patients who suffer from chronic illnesses and diseases while receiving curative treatment. (Horowitz, Grambling & Quill, 2014) purposely states the misconceptions of palliative care and advocated for seriously ill patients that education must bring under control the misconceptions. Some patients do not receive appropriate symptom management because the palliative care treatment needed is often confused with end-of-life care. However, end-of-life care attempts to relieve pain and suffering when a disease is no longer responsive to curative treatment. Pain and suffering could ultimately be controlled or even eliminated through the proper utilization of palliative care. Patients who are not referred to palliative care in a timely manner is more likely to have poor quality of life, uncontrolled symptom management and increased amounts of visits to the emergency room during the disease process. Patients with life limiting illnesses bear the burden of increased discomfort and increased suffering. Nurses experience clinical practice issues and difficulties in the clinical setting during the delivery of comfort and symptom management. These issues

When patients are unable to meet their needs independently, they become distressed and encounter feelings of helplessness. Every patient is different and will exhibit needs that are individualized to them personally. This is where the nurse comes in. Their relationship to the patient must be built on trust and they need to know that patient well enough to determine what their needs are (Current Nursing, 2010). Orlando felt that nurses act independently on behalf of their patients. She believed that by using a nursing process, the nurse would be capable of meeting the patient’s immediate needs (Nurse Scribe, 2007).

C. Create a holistic nursing action plan appropriate for managing Mrs. Thomas’s care at home. 1. Discuss ways to optimize Mrs. Thomas’s functional ability at this stage of her illness. Holistic nursing job is to focus on the whole wellbeing of a patient. As a holistic nursing, first she needs to set up a good relationship with patient to form a trustworthy bond between the patient and nurse, then she will design and implement alternative treatments to help the patient to gain better quality of life.

Another skill required for a nurse working with the above patient is assessment. The patient is elderly and suffers from dementia. The patient’s body changes with aging and with dementia this person losses mental capacity. What the nurse needs to work with this patient is excellent assessment skill. In this case the assessment, planning, interventions, and evaluation of plan need to be totally changed. Only a nurse who possesses very good critical and analytical thinking ability is able to take care of this patient.

The purpose of this discussion is to complete the critical thinking exercise for chapter 9 in Huber (2015). This case is regarding a non-verbal patient that is to go to the operating room (OR) to have a radical mastectomy at 8:30AM and is being cared for by a newly hired nurse (James Fair) who starts his shift at 7:00AM, a nursing assistant (Julie Coggeshall), and Sherry Trader the charge nurse. The aspects of care discussed include the problems in this case, when to delegate and assign care, dimensions of power and conflict and two solutions are provided, along with two communication techniques. Furthermore, the delegation plan, and Sherry Trader’s options if the staff refuse to accept the delegated tasks. The included staff have only an hour and a half to assess, plan, and implement tasks to prepare the patient for her surgical procedure.

State of the art technology has driven the evolution of oncology healthcare services. Cutting edge pharmaceutical research and drug developments in recent years have dramatically changed the way cancer specialists manage and treat cancer. Advanced diagnostic tools and computer assisted surgical devices empower medical providers to detect malignant tumors earlier and remove affected areas with less impact on healthy organs and tissue. Oncology electronic health records (EHR) are a valuable resource for physicians and clinicians as they pursue better treatment options and outcomes for their patients.

7. Which collaborative problem will the nurse include in a care plan for a patient admitted to the

I will strive to make short trips to other patient's rooms to save enough time for Esther. Moreover, I will delegate a nursing assistant to other patients and seek to read their recorded accounts of other patient's visual

This actually was not the first time that I have seen this movie, but after learning about cancer for the past few weeks, I saw the film and characters in a different way. Overall, I think the movie is a good depiction of the emotional stages someone might go through after being diagnosed with cancer, and I think it also showed the physical affects of cancer pretty well for Adam and his chemotherapy friends. One thing I liked about the movie was that I developed emotional connections with the characters. I felt anger at the ex-girlfriend for being selfish and heartless, I felt hopelessness for Adam when the results of the chemotherapy came back ineffective, I felt love for Kyle when I saw the “Dealing With Cancer” book with notes and dog-eared pages, and I felt pure joy when Adam came out of surgery and finally got a girlfriend and a life that he seemed to deserve so badly. One of the themes that stuck out most to me throughout the movie was Adam’s support system, or lack there of for most of the movie. It really made me think about how important that is for someone going through cancer, but also anyone trying to recover from an illness or

Value is broadly defined as healthcare outcomes obtained per dollar spent[5]. That is to say, that if two different interventions for a particular oncological process have the same end result, then the intervention with the lower cost represents greater value. While this seems like a fairly straightforward concept, attempting to measure value elucidates some of the challenges. For example, at what juncture do we measure an intervention’s value? Is it immediately after an operative intervention, at the 1-yr survival or at the 5-yr survival mark? Do we measure overall survival or disease-free survival? Is survival the most relevant endpoint from the patient perspective; should we instead consider symptoms, functional status or quality of life (QOL)?