Nele De Bal

..Although nurses worldwide are confronted with euthanasia requests, how nurses experience their involvement in euthanasia remains unclear...

..Hence, sufficient support for nurses to reach a well-balanced integration of both perspectives is essential...

..This paper is a report of a study exploring nurses' involvement in the care process for mentally competent, terminally ill patients requesting euthanasia in general hospitals in Flanders, Belgium...

..e. administration of lethal drugs by someone other than the person concerned with the explicit intention of ending a patient's life, at the latter's explicit request) by means of a literature review...

..To describe the communication during the euthanasia care process for mentally competent, terminally ill patients in general hospitals in Flanders, as seen from the perspective of the nurse...

..Nurses feel a discrepancy, because although it is a nice death, which happens in dignity and with respect, it is also an unnatural death. The clinical ethical implications of these findings are discussed...

..There is a need to include nurses' voices in the end-of-life discourse because they offer a contextual understanding of euthanasia and requests to die, which is borne out of real experience with people facing death...

..Our findings suggest, however, that we should look beyond this superficial view and seek to understand the narrative as an expression of one's attempt to counterbalance devaluation...

..CONCLUSIONS: This implementation project showed that a discharge planning intervention can reduce institutionalization rates of elderly patients in real-life settings...