Improving the quality of life before death is important. People suffer when their parent or even a loved one is in a condition that will lead to death. In such a situation, people will always want to ensure that they ease their pain both physically and emotionally; they would also want to allow their family members to die with dignity. In this case, medical institutions should ensure that they improve their general quality of care at the end of life.
Recommendations for Improving the Quality Care at the End of Life
One of the ways to improve the quality of care at the end of life is through training more clinicians on the issue of palliative care. It is important to educate clinicians ensuring that they meet the needs of their patients when they approach the last days of their lives. Clinicians should be trained on how to handle patients and how to prepare their family members. This training requires a lot of financial support to expand the total number of doctors’ nurses and other health care practitioners (Izumi et al., 2012). It is important to train clinicians so that they can prepare the patients and their family members psychologically, physically, and emotionally on the issue of death and end of life.
Refining Medicare coverage is also significant in improving the general quality of life. At times, there are serious gaps in health care insurance coverage which might threaten people who are on the verge of dying. According to Izumi et al. (2012), it is important to change the Medicare policies for most countries so that they incorporate the benefits for the individuals diagnosed with illnesses. Through this, it would be possible to provide social support as well as care and coordination. Improving Medicare can be done through changing the types of services offered to people and through changing the insurance policies in a country to provide heath care services to a variety of individuals. Providing health care services is an important way of improving quality care at the end of life because it secures people’s lives if they are going to die and medical bills pile up.
Could Rationing End-of-Life Treatment Be Appropriate?
Within the health care environment, rationing implies the process of allocation of resources in which sometimes the health care practitioners necessarily withdraw from giving potential medicinal benefits to some individuals. Rationing the end of life is an ethical issue which has aroused a lot of medical debates. It is because at times it goes against the moral principles of heath care (Izumi et al., 2012). Rationing the end of life is sometimes unavoidable. However, at the end of life, it is important to ensure that resources are provided to each and every individual regardless of their situations. Life is an important factor, and health practitioners should ensure that they abide by the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence, which are important to consider.
Finally, I believe that each individual has the right to live, and God should determine matters of life and death. In this regard, doctors and other medical practitioners should ensure that they make efforts to provide the best quality of care. Through doing this, they would have performed based on the ethical principles outlined in connection with the provision of quality health care at all times.
References
Izumi, S., Nagae, H., Sakurai, C., & Imamura, E. (2012). Defining end-of-life care from perspectives of nursing ethics. Nursing Ethics, 19(5), 608-618.