In their article “Palliative Care for Patients with Severe Covid-19,” Ting et al. focus on ways to offer palliative care to critical Covid-19 patients in community and healthcare settings. Healthcare practitioners use a palliative strategy to manage patients with life-threatening diseases. They are also prepared to develop an acute care plan to support Covid-19 patients who may experience acute deterioration or lose their lives. Overall, palliative care during the pandemic era involves managing Covid-19 symptoms, providing support to patients and their families, and developing a strategy to handle deteriorating patients and their relatives.
The underlying issue discussed in the article is about approaches to relieving suffering in Covid-19 patients and their relatives. The authors’ perspectives demonstrate that symptom management, acute care planning, assignment of personnel resources, administration of sufficient parenteral medication, communication with patients’ families, and supportive responses are major factors shaping today’s palliative care. People with covid-19 often exhibit such symptoms as agitation, breathing difficulties, and fatigue (Ting et al., 2020). To ensure minimal breathlessness and alleviate other symptoms, healthcare providers administer oxygen therapy and opioids to Covid-19 patients.
Additionally, healthcare practitioners may create an urgent care plan based on the patient’s wishes, needs, and interests in case of acute deterioration. They should also have anticipatory medications and a clinical management plan to facilitate symptom control and care delivery if a patient deteriorates rapidly.
Further, community nurses providing home-based care to covid-19 patients should be well-trained and equipped with medicines and personal protective equipment to help them provide community services effectively and safely. Lastly, healthcare practitioners may use supportive and hope-worry statements when sharing information with Covid-19 patients and their relatives through video consultations and phone calls. Providing these support services enables care providers to deliver honest conversations, communicate expectations to patients’ families, and update them in a more compassionate way.
Healthcare professionals should be supportive, make informed triage decisions, and use compassionate and honest statements when delivering palliative care to seriously ill covid-19 patients. Nurses should innovate compassionate ways and use empathetic statements to alleviate stress and anxiety in critical Covid-19 patients and their relatives. If a patient is likely to deteriorate or die, healthcare professionals should use documented preferences and recognize his or her wishes to design an urgent care plan. Therefore, the article helps us understand ways to comfort critically ill patients and their relatives, ensure excellent symptoms palliation, promote strong therapeutic relationships, and balance hopes and fears during the delivery of Covid-19 palliative care.
References
Ting, R., Edmonds, P., Higginson, I. J., & Sleeman, K. E. (2020). Palliative care for patients with severe covid-19. British Medical Journal (BMJ), 370: m2710. https://www.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m2710
