The end of life of the greater part of the patients can be characterized by their experience of distressing symptoms and the seriousness of the issue accounts for the importance and necessity of application of palliative care (American College of Physicians – American Society of Internal Medicine and End-of-Life Consensus Panel, 2001, p. 3). The same authors state that palliative care, the main focus of which is comfort and psychological support of the patient serves as the foundation for all health care (American College of Physicians – American Society of Internal Medicine and End-of-Life Consensus Panel, 2001, p. 3), which accounts for the importance of the present paper. The paper is devoted to the analysis of the two articles about end-of-life care in hospitals. However, the authors throw light on the common topic by applying different methodological approaches.
The analyzed article under the title “To Live Until You Die: Quality of Life at the End of Life” by Cramer (2010) is devoted to the issue of early introduction of palliative care in cancer experience (p. 53). In short and concise subsections, the author presents her opinion on the quality of life of patients, difficult conversations, presence, and communication as the necessary elements of palliative care. The author attributes the role of teachers to nurses; the idea of the article is that nurses can and should be the main effective bearers of palliative care.
Though the scientific foundation of the article cannot be questioned, and credibility of the material presented can be justified by the fact that the author is a clinical administrative supervisor at Tampa General Hospital and oncology, palliative care, critical care, and pediatric/neonatal educator at Real Nurse Ed in Tampa, FL. (Cramer, 2010, p. 55), the article can hardly be called the account of an experiment. It can rather be qualified as a motivation article aimed at nurses as the main administers of palliative care.
The greater part of the article is based on the professional experience of the author, the only experimental ground the author presents is “a prospective, longitudinal, multiple cohort studies of 332 patient and caregiver dyads” that studies the state of patients about the effectiveness of end-of-life discussions they are given (Cramer, 2010, p. 55). However, it is difficult to comment on the selection of participants, their experience, and the choice of data collection instruments since they are not mentioned by the researcher. Thus, additional information on the study is needed.
In contrast to the above-analyzed article, the second article under analysis, “End-of-life Care in Hospital: A Descriptive Study of All Inpatient Deaths in 1 Year.” by Abel and Rich, can be considered an investigation. The study was aimed at the quantitative assessment of the patients who died in a district general hospital in England while they could have been cared for at home; the researchers wanted to calculate the cost of each patient stay and to calculate the possible savings in hospital admissions (Abel and Rich, 2009, p. 616).
The authors have displayed sufficient control over all methodological components of the study. The choice of the participants (dead patients) accounts for the validity of the experiment. The authors explain the exclusion of patients below the age of 18, those who were not admitted to the hospital, and those who died in the Accident and Emergency Department (Abel and Rich, 2009, p. 617). The parameters of the assessment (primary diagnosis, reason of admission, etc.) account for the external validity of the experiment since the same parameters can be used in similar experiments in other hospitals (Grove, 2005, p. 219).
Concluding, it is possible to state that though both analyzed articles relate to end-of-life care, they cover different aspects of the issue. Thus, the first article cannot be qualified as the experiment as the account does not present the methodology, while the second article can be characterized as an account of the investigation and the validity and credibility of the study can be successfully proven.
Reference List
Abel, J., & Rich A. End-of-life Care in Hospital: A Descriptive Study of All Inpatient Deaths in 1 Year. (2009). Palliative Medicine, 23, 616-622.
American College of Physicians – American Society of Internal Medicine, & End-of-Life Care Consensus Panel. (2001). Physician’s Guide to End-of-Life Care. USA: ACP Press.
Cramer, C. (2010). To Live Until You Die: Quality of Life at the End of Life. Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing, 14(1), 53-56.
Grove, S.K. (2005). The Practice of Nursing Research: Conduct, Critique, and Utilization. USA: Elsevier Health Sciences.