Aims of Nursing: Facilitating Coping with Disability and Death

Although the major goals of healthcare are promoting, maintaining, and restoring
health, these goals cannot always be met. Nurses also facilitate patient and family
coping with altered function, life crisis and death. Altered function decreases an
individual’s ability to carry out activities of daily living and expected roles. Nurses
can facilitate an optimal level of function through maximizing person’s strengths
and potentials, through teaching, and through referral to community support
systems. Nurses provide care to both patients and families during end of life care.
Nurses are active in hospice programs, which assist patients and their families in
preparing for death and in living as comfortably as possible until death occurs.
(Fundamentals of Nursing: the art and science of nursing care 6th edition, Carol R.
Taylor, RN PhD, et al 2008)

Praying For Patients

With research suggesting links between prayer and physical, mental, and spiritual
health (Fish, 1995), arguments are being made that healthcare professionals have
an obligation to pray as well as with their patients. At the present time, no one is
claiming that healthcare professionals are negligent if they fail to pray for patients.
This may, however, be an effective intervention strategy. At the very least, nurses
ought to be mediators of the spiritual resources patients and their families need.
(Fundamentals of Nursing: the art and science of nursing care 6th edition, Carol R.
Taylor, RN PhD, et al 2008)