A reflective practice intervention to act on the moral distress of nurses providing end-of-life care on acute care units.

Background:: Nurses providing end-of-life care in acute care units often suffer from moral distress. Reflective practice (RP) may enable these nurses to realise desirable practice and then decrease their moral distress.

Aims:: This study aims to assess the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effects of an RP intervention on moral distress.

[Caring for persons at the end of life in a curative care unit: privileges and heartbreaks].

The objective of this study was to describe the experience of caring for individuals at the end of life by five nurses working in curative care units. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to gain a better understanding of the meaning nurses give to this experience. The analysis of results, based on Giorgi's phenomenological method (1997), highlighted a central meaning: it is a human experience fraught with paradoxes where the bedside nurse feels both privileged to be accompanying these individuals at the end of their lives and torn between the medical priority given to curative care and the lesser priority given to palliative care.