Evaluation of Implementation of Nurses’ Knowledge of Advance Directives

Evaluation of Implementation of Nurses’ Knowledge of Advance Directives
This research project conducted in acute care units of a Midwestern hospital has great potential findings for this hospital and for other hospitals. Advance directives are often an area of patient rights that are overlooked when a patient enters an acute care area. When advance directives are disregarded or not discussed, ethical and moral dilemmas will probably arise (Sherrill, 2000). Barbara Ott sites in her paper, Advance Directives: The Emerging Body of Research, that only 5% of patients have received information on advance directives and that when advance directives were present, they were only incorporated in the medical record 35% of the time (1999). Who better than the nurse caring for the patient to insure patients are informed about living as well as dying? To be able to educate patients about their rights in advanced directives, nurses must have knowledge about them. This research study evaluated th...