Palliative care challenges and ethical issues: a descriptive study

Introduction
Nurses experience difficulties and face ethical problems especially when caring for this patient group. The aim of this study is to determine the difficulties and ethical problems experienced by nurses working in the field of oncology in palliative care.

Material and methods
The sample of the study consisted of 69 nurses. In the data collection form, personal characteristics of the participants’ profession and questions about palliative care and Palliative Care Difficulties Scale (PCDS) were included. Descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal-Wallis H test, Bonferroni correction, Spearman correlation coefficient were used to interpret the findings.

Results
The mean age of the participants was 32.93 ±6.79 years, 78.3% of them were female, 65.2% of them did not receive training on palliative care approach, and 50.7% of them thought that they did not provide adequate palliative care. The mean score of the PCDS was 45.46 ±8.44. A statistically significant difference was found between the participants’ age, education level, years of experience in oncology and the total and sub-dimensions of the PCDS (p < 0.05).

Conclusions
Our study found that nurses working in an oncology hospital experienced moderate difficulty when providing palliative care to patients. We found that nurses most often related palliative caregiving, preparation for the death process, compassion, and improving the patient’s quality of life. It was found that participants experienced difficulties in communication and empathy, addressing the psychological issues of patients, dealing with family issues, and dealing with time and equipment shortages.