Assisted dying and nursing practice

Abstract

Purpose: Nurses' views are often solicited about physician-assisted dying, a concept that incorporates both assisted suicide and active euthanasia. Yet nurses are rarely asked about their own clinical experience of assisted dying. The literature indicates that many nurses experience difficulty distinguishing professionally sanctioned end-of-life interventions from those that are not. In this article the investigator explores the social, legal, and political roots of assistance in dying, and critically examines the profession's position on nurse participation in assisted dying and the research regarding nurse-assisted dying.

Scope: The bioethics and nursing literature was reviewed from 1990 to 1999. The databases used were the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature and Medline.

Conclusions: The complex nature of caring for highly symptomatic dying patients, and the difficulty some nurses experience in distinguishing a moral difference between hastening and assisting death, strongly indicate a need for additional nursing research that does not use a forced answer.