How do patients respond to end-of-life status?

March 10, 2014

(Nursing Times) – Although health professionals may tell patients when they are nearing the end of their lives, patients do not always absorb or want this information. Aside from close companions and friends, nurses have the closest and most sustained contact with dying people. In the UK, Field’s (1989) study of nurses’ experiences of caring for dying patients showed that, by the 1980s, attitudes to telling patients about their terminal prognoses had changed.