Nurses take a stand on assisted suicide.
Nurses, individually and collectively, have an obligation to provide comprehensive and compassionate end-of-life care that includes the promotion of comfort and the relief of pain, and at times, foregoing life-sustaining treatments. The American Nurses Association (ANA) believes that the nurse should not participate in assisted suicide. Such an act is in violation of the Code for Nurses with Interpretive Statements (Code for Nurses) and the ethical traditions of the profession. There is a continuum of end-of-life choices that encompasses a broad spectrum of interventions from the alleviation of suffering, adequate pain control, do-not-resuscitate orders, withdrawing/withholding artificially provided nutrition and hydration, to requests for assisted suicide and active euthanasia. Throughout this continuum nurses can respond to patients with compassion, faithfulness and support. Yet, nurses must understand the subtleties and distinctions of these issues in order to respond in a reasoned and ethically permissible manner.
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D000575:American Nurses' Association; D004993:Ethics, Nursing; D006801:Humans; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D017236:Suicide, Assisted; D014481:United States