Background: Caring in palliative care aims to mitigate suffering, promote health and well-being despite the sickness and increase quality of life. Caring is nurses´ major responsibility, therefore nurses must care from a holistic view based on the unique person’s needs. Acquiring knowledge and effective communication skills is therefore important to possess in palliative care, since patients and relatives highlight shortcomings regarding caring in palliative care.
Purpose: The purpose of the study was to create an overview of caring for patients in palliative care from nurses´ perspectives.
Method: A general literature review of both qualitative and quantitative studies.
Results: Four themes were analysed based on nurses’ perspectives, of which communication, good care, teamwork, knowledge, and competence were considered important aspects of caring in palliative care. Communication was regarded as an important aspect of patient data collection to provide a higher quality of care. Whereas knowledge and competence regarding symptom relieving were seen by nurses as an essential for preserving patients’ dignity and autonomy. Nurses felt satisfaction when good care was experienced by patients and relatives. However, lack of time, high workload, poor teamwork, low knowledge, and competence were seen as obstacles to maintaining good caring in palliative care.
Conclusion: nurses experienced positive feelings and shortcomings regarding caring in palliative care. With excellent communication skills, good teamwork, competence, and knowledge good palliative care could be experienced by patients and relatives.
Keywords: Communication, knowledge, palliative care, teamwork.
2022. , p. 51