Neonatal Palliative Care In Action Nursing Essay

Neonatal Palliative Care In Action Nursing Essay

Neonatal Palliative Care. This theoretically focused paper aims to move beyond the rhetoric of espousing the importance and timeliness of a model of palliative care for the neonatal population, to explore how what is known already can influence health and social policy. While this paper is largely informed by current events at Senate level within Australian Government, the research – empirical and otherwise – and the strong societal voice that informs the need to move the neonatal palliative care agenda forward transects borders and nations and therefore has relevance to all westernised countries.

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In recent years, there has been increasing awareness regarding the need for evidence-based neonatal palliative care, yet despite literature supporting neonatal palliative care practice, and the availability of protocols to inform practice, neonatal palliative care in the clinical environment remains extemporized.

A recent Commonwealth of Australia Senate enquiry into palliative care in Australia (Wilkinson et al., 2012) invited a submission regarding neonatal palliative care, bringing this widely neglected aspect of neonatal care to the forefront for the first time in our country.

In recent years, palliative care for the neonatal population has become increasingly topical and part of the lexicon of contemporary neonatal nursing practice. An evidence-based protocol (Catlin & Carter, 2002) has been available for a decade to inform this model of care, yet in reality, provision of palliative care to newborns is ad hoc (Cignacco & Zeitschrift-Für, 2004; Maginnes, 2002), and components of this protocol have been difficult to implement. The reasons why engaging in a palliative model of care were unclear, but now the barriers to a neonatal palliative model of care have been well defined to the point where this knowledge can inform policy (Kain, 2011; Kain et al., 2009).
Babies die too

At a societal level, death and dying in infancy is driven by high emotional content because the death of a newborn is considered a life that has ended too soon: illness and death are unexpected for a newborn and are devastating and life-altering events for the family. Society in general does not know how to respond to the death of a newborn, and therefore have few established social norms to help a family cope with such loss. Society more readily accepts deaths of adults and even of children. Complicating these ethical concerns is the notion that the death of a newborn in this highly curative environment is a failure of medical science.. Whilst