Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Corso di laurea in infermieristica - Sede di Modena
| Thesis Title | Together when choosing: qualitative research about the nurse's role during terminal patients' decision-making process |
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| Name | Maffei Camilla |
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| Supervisor(s) | Saguatti Ilaria, Laffi Patrizia |
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| Academic Year | 2021/22 |
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| Thesis type | Research thesis |
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Abstract
In a palliative care setting, the healthcare workers are faced with challenging tasks daily, such as unpropitious diagnosis, ethical conflicts and complicated grief. One of the most challenging duties of a nurse is helping the patients with end-of-life decisions. In the literature, this topic remains quite controversial and there are still no theoretical certainties. We see this with medical paternalism, contracts paradigm and nudging. Indeed, all the practices mentioned above are support strategies to the patients’ decision-making process, which have been refuted throughout time, for one reason or another. Therefore, what are the strategies used by palliative care nurses to help the patients in the decision-making process? We decided to do qualitative research and to collect the necessary data, we divided the 12 participants into three focus groups. In doing so, we were able to better analyse their personal experiences. Among the participants there were also palliative care nurses and students majoring in nursing. From the thematic analysis of the collected data, it was possible to split the various experiences of the participants into five different categories: the perception of death, the awareness, the mediators for an independent choice, the obstacles to an independent choice and the grey area of the support for an independent choice. Afterwards, we further divided the experiences into other sub-categories, in order to obtain more precise results. For the most part, the results we were able to obtain from our data analysis were confirmed by the existing literature. Nonetheless, it was possible to highlight issues that the modern palliative care still faces, such as benevolent paternalism and the conspiracy of silence. In conclusion, through this research, we obtained significant data and were able to answer the above question. Nevertheless, there is still space for further investigations aimed at exploring the issues raised by this research.
