Practice

1. Strive to attain a standard of primary palliative care so that all health care providers have basic knowledge of palliative nursing to improve the care of patients and families.

2. All nurses will have basic skills in recognizing and managing symptoms, including pain, dyspnea, nausea, constipation, and others.

3. Nurses will be comfortable having discussions about death, and will collaborate with the care teams to ensure that patients and families have current and accurate information about the possibility or probability of a patient’s impending death.

4. Encourage patient and family participation in health care decision-making, including the use of advance directives in which both patient preferences and surrogates are identified.