Importance of religion and culture in the palliative care approach
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Importance of religion and culture in the palliative care approach
Introduction
The topic of palliative care is a daunting subject for most patients and healthcare professionals. It is influenced by both the patient and the practitioner’s religious traditions that are also heavily impacted by religious and cultural experiences. This article will discuss the importance of culture and religion in the patient’s life. The essence of palliative care allows a safe and culturally diverse environment to be prominent in the aspects of care that upholds several standards. The organization’s concern regarding end-of-life care and treatment, caregivers, and their families is a highly emotional problem. Behaviors to palliative care and strategies vary significantly across cultures and religions. Decisions are affected by the clinicians, the patients together with families’ values (Rego et al. 2020).
Making space for palliative care in humanitarian action: Reflections on obstacles to integrating palliative care approaches in humanitarian healthcare. (2019, August 13). Retrieved August 29, 2020, from https://www.elrha.org/project-blog/making-space-palliative-care-humanitarian-action-reflections-obstacles-integration-palliative-care-approaches-humanitarian-healthcare/
The promotion of best practice in the clinical area is achieved through understanding the palliative care approach during healthcare delivery. Health care workers that provide quality palliative care are those that: Endeavor to preserve the integrity of care recipients, caregivers, and their families; operate with empathy towards the caregiver together with the care recipient together with his or her family; acts with the care recipient’s weaknesses and strengths while the caregiver and the family are encouraged them to hand their predicament; in the allocation of resources and services the health care consider equity in the accessibility; illustrates respect towards the recipient, family, and the caregiver; advocate for the shared interests of the recipients, families, caregiver, and Community. According to the Privacy Act 1988, related Australian Privacy Principles and other applicable local and national health policies, enforcement of the Standards should happen (Yuvaraj, 2018).
Palliative care role in cultural care provider
When science and medicine progressed, many of the diseases that were once considered “death sentences” became chronic diseases. This serves to make mortality and death quite difficult in some respects, contentious with judgments on what treatment is necessary and when care should be delayed or removed (Holland et al. 2019). Researches have also shown that patients facing life-threatening diseases have religious beliefs which their healthcare professionals do not address. Palliative care philosophy and practice rely on an interpretation of everything in the individual’s experience, embodied in the biopsychosocial model’s multi-dimensional approach (Ferrell & Coyle).
Advance Care Planning in Cognitively Impaired Older Adults. (2018, September 12). Retrieved August 29, 2020, from https://palliative.stanford.edu/acp_cognitively_impaired_adults/
An individual cannot provide person-wide care without taking into account the specific religious beliefs held by patients with chronic diseases. As physicians in palliative care, they are ideally qualified to collaborate with patients/teams/families to discuss the various factors patients and their families utilize as the core values when facing challenging end-of-life considerations (Johnson & Chang 2018). Although they are also advised on physical signs and symptoms management, that is just aspect of the work. As healthcare operates on building relationships with our patients and their care team, They are often prepared to support and facilitate communication, allowing mutually agreeable goals (Cain et al. 2018). Under the patient’s cultural backgrounds, healthcare practitioners are prepared to interact with patients whose belief is a component. The obstacles to proper spiritual treatment must be recognized.
When healthcare practitioners learn about how patients make end-of-life choices, if health providers don’t know how to interpret the patient’s culture, they would have failed (Johnson 2017). Healthcare practitioners need to be culturally aware and professional in their work as palliative medical providers. Culture is not only defined in the wider sense by race or ethnicity; it is defined or affected by spiritual development / religious belief, educational level, acculturation level, age, gender, sexual, country of origin, orientation, and immigration status (Lalani et al. 2018). Culture is indeed a crucial component to remember as we take care of the ill and the suffering, as the environment of a person can affect how they perceive the disease and death, and also how they come to make decisions about the end of life (Wong et al. 2018).
In the perception of life-threatening illness, culture plays an undeniably significant part. And despite one’s cultural context or interests, some requirements are similar for all people living with the disease (Speck, 2016). Both patients and families desire to face the end of their lives with integrity, self-respect, and a chance to create and protect their reputation; what’s different, maybe how they perform these responsibilities.
For several patients who consider faith and religious fundamentalism essential to their understanding and reaction to sickness, they desire the opportunity with their health care team to address their spiritual struggles (Becker, 2016). Some patients might even view their practitioners as instruments that God uses to cure pain or provide restoration (Lalani et al. 2018). But the final judgment on the result of the disease is seen to reside only with God. Therefore miracles are always probable when medication stalls. Finding a practitioner who’s dedicated to faith and engaging in spiritual conversations will also help make patients more relaxed, helping them address the difficulties they face as they contemplate their fate. Sickness is quite often interpreted as the “will of God;” the recognition of “the will of God” has been used as a survival tactic — those who have seen their sickness throughout this context usually believed that God was in complete command of the result. Spirituality is also used to assist in recognizing a symptom.
Palliative care role in spiritual care provider
Apparent in its concept as a specialized medical area, palliative care towards patients and family members has at its root the preservation and enhancement of quality of life (Caxaj et al. 2018). As physicians in palliative care, they ideally qualified to collaborate with patients/teams/families to discuss the various factors people and their families use as core values when facing challenging end-of-life considerations. Although healthcare practitioners also questioned on physical symptoms management, which is just part of their work. As health care practitioners focus on developing relationships with both the patients and caregivers team, the healthcare workers can also promote collaboration that facilitates a better appreciation and satisfaction of the treatment priorities shared by those we treat.
Neese, B. (n.d.). A Guide to Culturally Competent Nursing Care. Retrieved August 29, 2020, from http://blog.diversitynursing.com/blog/a-guide-to-culturally-competent-nursing-care
Spiritual treatment is identified as among the institutions closely related to palliative care. The National Consensus Project on Quality Palliative Care has released recommendations for defining palliative care medical practice. They offer a guide for guiding palliative care procedure and implementation of both in situations with defined palliative care services and any situations where patient care is being offered.
The Quality Palliative Care Guidelines for Clinical Practice have established eight central to palliative care areas as a discipline. The fifth of those eight areas are social, economic, and metaphysical treatment (Pentaris & Thomsen, 2020). The recommendations recommend that the integrative palliative care team involves individuals with pastoral care knowledge and qualifications capable of identifying and reacting to religious or spiritual challenges encountered by those experiencing the life-threatening disease (Abudari et al. 2016). These guidelines suggest a periodic review, reconsideration, verification of religious issues, and intervention strategies to resolve existing problems. They promote the use, where necessary, of structured methods to evaluate and define the patient and family’s spiritual or religious/emotional context, interests, and convictions (Lalani et al. 2018). Healthcare practitioners also have the role of advocating the spiritual and religious traditions of patients, which offer relief, particularly at the end of life.
Pin on Palliative Care. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29, 2020, from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/271271577527150900/
Healthcare practitioners are trained as palliative care professionals to interact with the patients in meaningful ways, using listening skills, constructive presence, and positive conversation to help them understand and cope with their problems. Healthcare practitioners are called upon to be completely present; they rely upon to place their interests behind and offer their ears and consideration to the patients’ worries, pain, hopes, and wishes (Fang et al. 2016). Healthcare practitioners are required to evaluate the patient, discover who they are, whatever matters to them, what determines how they decide things, and what brings meaning in their life.
In conclusion, at its heart, palliative care aims at alleviating pain, improving life quality, offering treatment, and support to those living with severe illness. Over the years, various research in the sense of serious illness has demonstrated the value of spiritual beliefs, spirituality, and religious coping. Assessing and paying attention to religious needs has been described as essential aspects in enhancing life quality, and often these need to go unmentioned or unacknowledged. Unresolved spiritual problems can infuriate an individual’s efforts to treat certain conditions and adversely affect the wellbeing. The distressing signs can be lessened when each factor is discussed in sequence.
References
Abudari, G., Hazeim, H., & Ginete, G. (2016). Caring for terminally ill Muslim patients: Lived experiences of non-Muslim nurses. Palliative & supportive care, 14(6), 599-611.
Becker, R. (2016). Fundamental Aspects of Palliative Care Nursing 2nd Edition: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Student Nurses (Vol. 3). Andrews UK Limited.
Cain, C. L., Surbone, A., Elk, R., & Kagawa-Singer, M. (2018). Culture and palliative care: preferences, communication, meaning, and mutual decision making. Journal of pain and symptom management, 55(5), 1408-1419.
Caxaj, C. S., Schill, K., & Janke, R. (2018). Priorities and challenges for a palliative approach to care for rural indigenous populations: a scoping review. Health & Social Care in the Community, 26(3), e329-e336.
Fang, M. L., Sixsmith, J., Sinclair, S., & Horst, G. (2016). A knowledge synthesis of culturally-and spiritually-sensitive end-of-life care: findings from a scoping review. BMC geriatrics, 16(1), 107.
Ferrell, B.R., & Coyle, N. (Eds.). (2015). Oxford textbook for palliative nursing (4th ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
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Johnson, C. (2017). Living with dignity: a palliative approach to care at the end of life. Australian Nursing and Midwifery Journal, 25(6), 30.
Holland, K., Jenkins, J., Solomon, J., & Whittam, S. (Eds.). (2019). Dying. In D. Roberts, Applying the Roper-Logan-Tierney Model in practice (2nd ed.). (Ch.14., pp.453-476). Churchill Livingstone Elsevier.
Lalani, N., Duggleby, W., & Olson, J. (2018). Spirituality among family caregivers in palliative care: An integrative literature review. International journal of palliative nursing, 24(2), 80-91.
Pentaris, P., & Thomsen, L. L. (2020). Cultural and religious diversity in hospice and palliative care: A qualitative cross-country comparative analysis of the challenges of health-care professionals. OMEGA-Journal of Death and Dying, 81(4), 648-669.
Rego, F., Gonçalves, F., Moutinho, S., Castro, L., & Nunes, R. (2020). The influence of spirituality on decision-making in palliative care outpatients: a cross-sectional study. BMC palliative care, 19(1), 1-14.
Speck, P. (2016). Culture and spirituality: essential components of palliative care. Postgraduate medical journal, 92(1088), 341-345.
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Yuvaraj, J. (2018). How about me? The scope of personal information under the Australian Privacy Act 1988. Computer law & security review, 34(1), 47-66.