Comfort measures are crucial for the dying patient and their loved ones. Comfort measures include not only pain management, but also massage, music, position changes, and warmth, all of which are equally important. Palliative care is an extremely important aspect of nursing. Palliative care “focuses more broadly on improving the lives and comfort of people of all ages with serious, chronic, and life-threatening illnesses” (http://www.WebMD.com). The ultimate goal of comfort measures and palliative care is to ensure that the patient has a more relaxed and peaceful death (End of Life Care: An Ethical Overview, 16). Other important aspects of palliative care include hygienic measures, which include keeping the patient dry and clean, offering food and fluids often, and keeping the patient and their family also as comfortable as possible. Some try to argue that drugs, such as morphine, should not be given to the dying because they hasten the dying process, but I believe that their death is inevitable and it is best to put the patient also in the process. as comfortable as possible. For many families, the idea of ​​losing a family member is too much to handle, but with pain management, at least the patient can die relatively pain-free. This can be comforting for the family. Although there are painkillers that can suppress the respiratory and cardiovascular systems, the patient generally experiences a much more peaceful death than if he or she took no medication. Palliative care “focuses more broadly on improving the lives and comfort of patients. people of all ages with serious, chronic and life-threatening illnesses” (http://www.WebMD.com). Palliative care is not the same as hospice, since it is not just for the dying. Depending ...... middle of paper ...... what the nurse or family can do. The goal of palliative care is to make the patient's passage as comfortable and relaxing as possible. Medication management must be ensured for each suffering patient to enable a more comforting, painless and peaceful death. Works Cited Aranella, Cheryl, MD., MPH Use of opiates to manage pain in critically and terminally ill patients. American Palliative Care Foundation, 2006. Web. November 7, 2011. Center for Bioethics: University of Minnesota. End-of-life care: an ethical overview. 2005. PDF. Kam, Katherine. What is palliative care? WebMD, January 24, 2011. Web. November 7, 2011. McGhee, James and Kathleen Ouimet Perrin. Ethics and conflict. Massachusetts: Jones and Bartlett, 2008. Print. World Health Organization. Nursing care of the sick: a guide for nurses working in small rural hospitals. WHO. Print.