The significance for critical care nurses of the "dying with dignity" legislation

This paper examines the potential contribution of the critical care nurse to ethical decisions made with respect to the dying with dignity legislation. The literature to date on ethics in nursing has largely focused on increasing nurses awareness thereby encouraging their contribution to the ethical decision-making process. By accentuating the 'art of nursing' where forms of knowing encompass an understanding of the patient's experience, this article describes the unique contribution that the nurse can make to the specific area of 'dying with dignity' in the acute care setting. On a theoretical level this knowledge is invaluable as it ensures a range of constituents are accommodated in this decision-making process, however, in practice this ideal is not readily attainable. Firstly, tradition seeks to curtail the value of this form of nursing knowledge in the decision-making process and secondly, nurses need to recognise their own prejudices in order to make an appropriate contribution to this legitimate body of knowledge.