Article

Defining end-of-life care fromperspectives of nursing ethics

Nursing Ethics
19(5) 608–618ª The Author(s) 2012
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10.1177/0969733011436205
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Shigeko (Seiko) Izumi
Washington State University, USA

Hiroko Nagae, Chihoko Sakurai and Emiko Imamura
Chiba University, Japan
Abstract
Despite increasing interests and urgent needs for quality end-of-life care, there is no exact definition of whatis the interval referred to as end of life or what end-of-life care is. The purpose of this article is to report our
examination of terms related to end-of-life care and define end-of-life care from nursing ethics perspectives.
Current terms related to end-of-life care, such as terminal care, hospice care, and palliative care, are basedon a medical model and are restrictive in terms of diagnosis and prognosis. Using codes of ethics for nurses
as a framework, we attempt to identify people to whom nurses are responsible to provide end-of-life careand develop a definition of end-of-life care that is more inclusive and applicable to a broader range of people
who would benefit from end-of-life care by nurses and other health-care providers.
Keywords
Code of ethics, end-of-life care definition, nursing ethics, palliative care, terminal care

Introduction
In 2011, Chiba University Graduate School of Nursing in Japan started a new program for end-of-life care innursing. As founding faculty of the program, we started philosophical, theoretical, and empirical examinations of end-of-life care and nursing roles. Through this effort, we recognized the lack of precise definitionsof the meaning of end of life and end-of-life care, and, consequently, nurses’ practice and nursing roles in
end-of-life care are left for interpretation of each nurse. The purpose of this article is to report our work to
define ‘‘end-of-life care’’ as a framework for our program and to explore roles of nurses in end-of-life carefrom perspectives of nursing ethics.

History and current definitions related to end-of-life care
The term ‘‘end-of-life care’’ is often used interchangeably with various terms such as terminal care, hospicecare, or palliative care. Shifts in the preference of terms to use in the last 30–40 years have occurred, and thespecific meanings of terms have changed over time. Meanings and definitions of terms vary by organizations and countries as well (see Table 1).

Corresponding author: Shigeko (Seiko) Izumi, Washington State University, College of Nursing, P.O. Box 1495, Spokane, WA
99210-1495, USA
Email: seiko.izumi@wsu.edu

Table 1. Terms related to end-of-life care
Terms related
to end-of-life care
Terminal care

Terminal phase

Hospice care

Definition

Organization (country)

Source

The term ‘‘terminal care’’ has lost relevance andshould not be used any more, or only to describe
the care given during the very last stage (the lastfew days) of illness.
Terminal phase is when physicians judge a recovery
from an illness cannot be expected, no available
treatment improves the condition, and death isconsidered to be unavoidable in the near future.

The European Association for
Palliative Care

European Journal of Palliative Care2009; 16(6): 283.

All Japan Hospital Association, The
Japan Geriatrics Society Ethics
Committee, and Science Council ofJapan

http://www.ajha.or.jp/about_us/
activity/zen/090618.pdf
Geriatrics and Gerontology
International 2004; 4: 1–4.
http://www.scj.go.jp/ja/info/
kohyo/pdf/kohyo-20-t51-2.pdf
http://www.palliativecare.org.au/
Portals/46/docs/
PCA%20strategic%20plan%20%202008-2011.pdf

A hospice is a comprehensive service provided topeople living with and dying from an eventually fatal
condition. This may include inpatient medical care,
respite care and end of life care for people who areunable to die at home.
Hospice is a concept of care that involves healthprofessionals and volunteers who provide medical,
psychological, and spiritual support to terminally illpatients and their loved ones. Hospice stresses
quality of life—peace, comfort, and dignity.
Hospice services are available to persons who canno longer benefit from curative treatment and havea life expectancy of 6 months or less.

Palliative Care Australia

National Cancer Institute at the
National Institute of Health (USA)

http://www.cancer.gov/
cancertopics/factsheet/
Support/hospice(continued)

609

610
Table 1. (continued)
Terms related
to end-of-life care
Palliative care/hospice
palliative care

Definition

Organization (country)

SourcePalliative care is an approach that improves the qualityof life of patients and their families facing the
problems associated with life-threatening illness,through the prevention and relief of suffering bymeans of early identification and impeccableassessment and treatment of pain and otherproblems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual.
Palliative care is the active, total care of the patients
whose disease is not responsive to curative
treatment. Control of pain, of other symptoms, andof social, psychological and spiritual problems isparamount.
Palliative care is specialist care provided for all people
living with, and dying from an eventually fatal
condition and for whom the primary goal is qualityof life.
Hospice palliative care is whole-person health carethat aims to relieve suffering and improve thequality of living and dying.
Hospice palliative care is appropriate for any
patient and/or family living with, or at risk ofdeveloping, a life-threatening illness due to any
diagnosis, with any prognosis, regardless of age, andat any time they have unmet expectations and/or
needs, and are prepared to accept care.

World Health Organization

http://www.who.int/cancer/
palliative/definition/en/

The European Association for Palliative
Care

European Journal of Palliative Care2009; 16(6): 280.

Palliative Care Australia

http://www.palliativecare.org.au/
Portals/46/docs/
PCA%20strategic%20plan%20%202008-2011.pdf
http://www.chpca.net/HomeThe Canadian Hospice Palliative Care
Association(continued)

Table 1. (continued)
Terms related
to end-of-life careEnd-of-life care

Definition

Organization (country)

SourceNo exact definition of end of life; however, theevidence supports the following components: (1)the presence of a chronic disease(s) or symptoms
or functional impairments that persist but may also
fluctuate; and (2) the symptoms or impairments
resulting from the underlying irreversible diseaserequire formal or informal care and can lead todeath. Older age and frailty may be surrogates forlife-threatening illness and co-morbidity.
Understood as an extended period of one to two
years during which the patient/family and healthprofessionals become aware of the life-limiting
nature of their illness.
End-of-life care may also be understood more
specifically as comprehensive care for dying
patients in the last few hours or days of life.
End of life care combines the broad set of health andcommunity services that care for the population at
the end of their life.

National Institutes of Health (USA)

http://consensus.nih.gov/2004/
2004EndOfLifeCare
SOS024html.htm

The European Association for Palliative
Care

European Journal of Palliative Care2009; 16(6): 282.

Palliative Care Australia

http://www.palliativecare.org.au/
Portals/46/docs/
PCA%20strategic%20plan%20%202008-2011.pdf

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Nursing Ethics 19(5)Terminal care
Initially, terminal care was commonly used to describe care for dying patients, particularly in hospitalsettings. However, over the last 30 years, the use of the term ‘‘end-of-life care’’ has gradually increased andbeen substituted for ‘‘terminal care’’ in health-care literature written in English. Although ‘‘terminal care’’is still used as a subheading indexing in health-care literature databases such as PubMed, ‘‘end-of-life care’’has become the more broadly accepted term in English. The reason behind this transition is not clearly
explained, but Kashiwagi speculates that it may be due to the negative connotation of the term ‘‘terminal.’’1
Over the last 30–40 years in Japan, ‘‘terminal care’’ has been most commonly used to describe care for seriously ill patients who are dying from terminal illness.1 Although terminal care can include any patients who
are dying, historically most of the issues related to terminal care in Japan have focused on care for patientswith terminal-stage cancer. Because cancer has been the number one cause of death in Japan since 1981, andone in every three persons in Japan dies of cancer, a diagnosis of cancer implies death and dying. In addition,
there are obvious clinical indications when cancer is no longer responsive to treatments and a patient is in
the terminal stage of the illness. Therefore, use of the term ‘‘terminal care’’ in the care of dying patients,
especially with terminal-stage cancer, is acceptable and common in Japan at present.

Hospice care
The term ‘‘hospice’’ usually indicates a program or a type of care for terminally ill patients. Hospice careemphasizes provision of comfort and relief from symptoms and suffering, and addresses the patient’s psychological, social, and spiritual needs.2 While terminal care could include any care and treatments forpatients dying of any kind of serious illness, hospice care is specific to comfort care for dying patients who
most of the time agree to forgo active therapies.3 In Japan, less than 6-month prognosis is required to be
admitted to a hospice program, and this is a common hospice criterion across countries.4,5 Furthermore,national health insurance in Japan limits hospice admission only to patients with cancer or AIDS.6 In sum,
although a philosophical definition of hospice care is applicable to all patients in their end of life, a practicaldefinition limits this service only to patients who have less than 6-month life expectancy in general and topatients with a specific disease who agree to forgo curative treatment in some countries.

Palliative care
Palliative care is another term increasingly used to represent comfort-focused care for patients with lifethreatening illnesses. In 2002, the World Health Organization (WHO) revised their definition of palliative
care toan approach which improves quality of life of patients and their families facing life-threatening illness, throughthe prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatmentof pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial, and spiritual.7

This current WHO definition emphasizes the importance of active symptom management throughout thecontinuum of a patient’s illness, even before a patient enters the terminal stage of their illness. Introductionof palliative care to patients when they are still receiving curative treatment contributes to improving thequality of care they receive throughout their course of illness and, therefore, their quality of life. Although
inclusion of palliative care in the early stage of illness is still rare and is mostly considered as an option for
terminally ill patients, the scope of palliative care goes beyond the patient group narrowly designated for
hospice care.8 Palliative care encompasses comfort-focused, holistic care to any patient, including patients
receiving curative cancer treatments, patients with HIV/AIDS, and older adults with chronic illness otherIzumi et al.

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than cancer.3 WHO states that palliative care should be offered from the time of diagnosis to the end of life
throughout the course of illnesses and that it should not be limited only to the last few weeks of life when no
curative treatment is available.9
With this definition by the WHO and current efforts expanding palliative care beyond terminal illnesses,
palliative care should be seen as partially overlapping but not synonymous with end-of-life care. Palliative
care does not necessarily revolve around end of life. This is an important conceptual differentiation of theterms; however, palliative care is still often used interchangeably with hospice care or end of life care inclinical settings and in the society. Most in-hospital units providing hospice care are named as ‘‘palliative
care units’’ in Japan because the term hospice implies the strong connotation of a place for dying. ‘‘Palliative care teams’’ in hospital settings in various countries also are providing palliative care mostly to patients
whose curative treatment options are limited, and in the United States, there was a trend in the last 10 years
to rename organizations using the combined terms ‘‘hospice and palliative care’’ to encompass these services to meet both definitions.3 More recently, there is another movement in the United States to use ‘‘supportive care’’ instead of ‘‘palliative care’’ because of the belief that the term palliative care still carries a lotof baggage implying a negative death and dying. Although we are aware of the mixed use of these terms inour society, in order to delineate the scope of end-of-life care, we will differentiate palliative care and hospice care in this article as it has been defined above.

End-of-life care
Despite the increased use of the term ‘‘end of life’’ and ‘‘end-of-life care’’ in health-care and nursing literature, over the last 30 years, there is no exact definition of what constitutes the time interval referred to as
end of life.10 The period of time and types of patients who are considered to receive specific ‘‘end-of-lifecare’’ such as hospice service may be defined by regulatory, policy, or administrative guidelines, but there isno scientific evidence to support the clinical indications characterizing a period of end of life.10 This lack ofclinical evidence is largely due to the difficulty of reliable prognostication.11,12 To date, there is no clear
clinical indicator to predict time of death. Therefore, it is impossible, and may be unreasonable, to marka date such as 6 months before the predicted death as the beginning day of an end-of-life period.10
Researchers and clinicians in end-of-life care found three stereotyped trajectories of the last months andyears of patients’ lives.13 One of the trajectories is common among patients with various types of cancer,
maintaining good functions with a diagnosis of life-threatening illness for a long time followed by rapid
decline over a few weeks or months prior to death. This trajectory is relatively predictable once the tumor
becomes nonresponsive to treatments and continues to grow. Therefore, patients in this group are more
likely to be able to receive benefits from end-of-life care specific to time frame and prognosis such as hospice. Yet, new treatment options for advanced-stage cancer may become available, thereby postponing
death and making more difficult the decision of when patients enter end of life and should forgo
treatment. Two other kinds of trajectories that are more typical for patients with organ system failureand dementia/frailty are more difficult to set time frames for their functional decline and death.13 For
those, determining the beginning of their end-of-life stage is unattainable; therefore, introducing end-oflife care may be delayed, or they may not receive any end-of-life care until very near death.
It is interesting that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) report10 mentioned very broad interpretationsof the end-of-life period by stating ‘‘people can, in some respects, be considered to be approaching deathfrom the moment they are born’’ (p. 27). This view of an entire life conceptualized as a dying process may
be too broad and impractical to define care for people in the end-of-life period. But we will revisit thisphilosophical view of death as part of one’s whole life later because we believe that this view has the potential to define and expand the nursing role in end-of-life care. A more practical definition of end-of-life
period is usually evidenced by (a) the presence of a progressing chronic disease with pronounced symptoms

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Nursing Ethics 19(5)or functional impairments and (b) the presence of symptoms or impairments resulting from the underlying
conditions leading to death that require care.10
Because of the lack of specific indicators for the end-of-life time frame, it is not clear what is encompassed in end-of-life care. Frequently, people assume that end-of-life care is providing comfort care andholistic care to dying patients and their family in a time frame of days to weeks when they are actively dying.
But if end-of-life care is framed only by the brief time interval before actual death, many patients would beleft without receiving adequate end-of-life care because their time frames are not well predicted. In greatly
aging societies such as Japan, many older adults are going through one of the two trajectories that make it
difficult to determine when they enter the end of life and predict approaching death. How about a relatively
healthy older adult who does not have significant life-threatening illness but has concerns about approaching death because of his or her advanced age? Does this person need end-of-life care? Current definitions
related to end-of-life care are mostly based on the time to death and stage of illness. But there are many
people without a prognosis of how much time is left and who do not think they have terminal illness but
are actually facing end of life and need end-of-life care from nurses. Because they may not have an obvious
medical diagnosis leading to imminent death, physicians whose focus is treating a specific disease may not
be able to provide adequate care that the patient needs regarding end of life. On the other hand, nurses who
see a patient’s life as a whole are better situated to understand the patient’s condition and concerns and guidethem to examine and prepare for end of life. In order for nurses to identify these people and provide the carethey need, end-of-life care should not be defined from a medical perspective based on the presence of a terminal illness or estimated time remaining but from the nursing perspective based on a broader view of lifeand journey toward the inevitable end of life.

Nurses’ ethical responsibility in end-of-life care
Code of ethics for nurses
According to the international code of ethics for nurses by International Council of Nurses (ICN),15 nurses
are responsible to promote health, to prevent illness, to restore health, and to alleviate suffering. JapaneseNursing Association (JNA) adds to the ICN code ‘‘to assist individuals to live fully throughout their life
until the end’’ as the major purpose of nursing.16 ICN also states ‘‘The nurse’s primary professional responsibility is to people requiring nursing care,’’15 and both codes state that nurses should provide respectful andequitable care to all individuals, families, and communities needing nursing care regardless of age, color,
creed, culture, disability or illness, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, politics, race, or social status.15,16
Nurses’ responsibility to alleviate suffering resonates with the philosophy of hospice care and palliativecare. A difference is that nursing care to alleviate suffering is meant for all individuals, families, and communities who need nursing care and it is not limited to only people who have terminal-stage cancer or who
have symptoms due to underlying diseases. The Code of Ethics by JNA specifically states that nurses ought
to provide care to assist people to live fully throughout their life until the end, and it does not draw anartificial line determining the time to shift from care to live to end of life.

People who need end-of-life care
Which individuals, families, and communities need end-of-life nursing care? Nurses face death and takecare of people who are affected by death regardless of the areas and settings where they work. While mostof the Japanese people express their preference of dying at home,17,18 more than 80% of death in Japanoccurred in hospitals in 2009.19 Because patients’ need for end-of-life care is often not addressed until deathbecomes inevitable and imminent in acute-care hospitals, end-of-life care in hospital settings tends to beIzumi et al.

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rushed and inadequate. It is a consistent finding across many countries that patients are not receiving adequate care at the end of life during and following last hospitalization because their end-of-life care needs are
not recognized adequately.20–26 In addition, unless patients and their family know exactly what they want
and are being persistent about expressing their wishes, receiving timely end-of-life care and a peaceful deathat home or as they wish does not happen easily.
Death also happens outside of hospitals, so the home-visiting nurses, nurses in long-term care facilities,
and public health nurses also provide care to people who are dealing with end-of-life issues. Not only individuals who are facing death but also their family members and people around them would be affected andmay need care. In rapidly aging societies such as Japan, where the number of deaths is expected to double
within the next 30 years because of the large number of older population, the whole society is facing death ofa friend or family member, and the society, as a large community, needs end-of-life care. Narrow and medically oriented definitions of terminal care, hospice care, or palliative care do not provide a broad enoughscope to include all people who need end-of-life care.

Ethical issues related to definition of end-of-life care
The lack of inclusive definition of end-of-life care and people who are eligible to receive end-of-life carecreates ethical tensions for nurses. As described before, patients who are admitted to hospice palliative
care units are limited to those with terminal-stage cancer or HIV/AIDS in Japan. A patient who is suffering from advanced-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) cannot be admitted to the hospice palliative care unit because of his diagnosis. Nurses taking care of him may recognize his needs for
end-of-life care such as good symptom management and assistance to prepare him for death. But nurses
may not be able to bring in resources to meet his needs because he does not meet the hospice palliative
care criteria. Nurses in this situation would feel moral distress for providing unjust and inequitable caredifferentiating patients by their diagnosis. Nurses taking care of a young woman who is newly diagnosed
with breast cancer may recognize a need of this woman and her husband to talk about death. Although thispatient is not terminally ill and probably has a good chance to be cured by chemotherapy, she and herhusband may be concerned about death brought to the foreground of their consciousness by the cancer
diagnosis. If nurses do not acknowledge their needs to talk about death because the patient is not terminally ill, the nurses are not compliant with the code of ethics providing care to alleviate suffering and assist
to live as fully as possible throughout their life. When healthy older persons talk about their thoughts
about death and dying to nurses in a day-care center, the nurses may organize an educational session forthe community to introduce advance care planning and discuss issues around end of life. Not doing so
because nurses do not recognize people who are in need of end-of-life care is ethically unacceptable, andtheir competency to assess their needs and provide quality care to those who need nursing care isquestionable.27

Defining end-of-life care from nursing ethics perspectives
Limitations of terms currently used to describe end of life and end-of-life care constrain nursing care to
those who are in need of end-of-life care and cause ethical tensions between what nurses should do andcan/would do. As the NIH report10 mentioned, all people, in some respects, are approaching death from themoment they are born. And death will come whether or not the person or health-care providers know when it
is coming. Although advancement in medical technology sometimes gives us an illusion of death as an
option, death is not medically treatable or avoidable and it should not be addressed solely from a medical
treatment standpoint. Death as the end of life needs to be addressed in a more holistic manner throughout
the course of life. Because nursing employs a holistic view of persons and their life beyond medical

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Nursing Ethics 19(5)conditions and aims to provide holistic care, nurses can see people and judge when end-of-life care isneeded from the vantage point of broader scope of entire life of the person. Furthermore, nurses serve not
only patients in hospitals but also residents in long-term care facilities, people living in communities, andpeople who are relatively healthy and independent as well as those who are sick and dependent. Therefore, nurses are well situated to identify people who need end-of-life care and provide care when it isneeded.
We propose the definition of end-of-life care as ‘‘to assist persons who are facing imminent or
distant death to have best quality of life possible till the end of their life regardless of their medical
diagnosis, health conditions, or ages.’’ In this definition, the end of life is a discreet time period whena person is aware of the end of life, not a medically determined period of time before death. Regardless of health conditions, if a person reflects on his or her or other’s life and has concerns about deathand the end of life, this person, in a sense, is facing death and may benefit from care defined as endof-life care. The awareness about end of life can be raised from a patient’s own insight or result of
medical assessment without the patient’s awareness. In the latter case, which happens commonly inmany health-care settings, it is the health-care providers’ responsibility to address the need for end-oflife care with the patient and his or her family at the earliest opportunity. Because there is a broad
range of literature relevant to the ethics of end-of-life care communication in health-care settings andit is beyond the scope of defining end-of-life care, we will not discuss any communication strategies
or specific care for this situation in this article.
One of the characteristics of the definition we propose here is that it encompasses ethical responsibilities
that nurses owe to the larger society from promoting health to alleviation of suffering related to life and endof life. It also encompasses all individuals, families, and communities that nurses are responsible for, to provide care related to end of life. Furthermore, the scope of this definition is not limited to nursing. This isapplicable to a medical model to expand their end-of-life care to patients with frailty or chronic illnesses
other than cancer. Public health also can adapt this definition to educate communities and develop policies
to assure quality end-of-life care to members in the community.

Conclusion
By aligning the definition of end-of-life care with the code of ethics for nurses and expanding the scope of
end-of-life care beyond the narrowly defined medical conditions mostly in hospital settings, this definition
has the potential to increase the number of nurses involved to end-of-life care. This definition makes nurses
working in diverse settings aware about their ethical responsibility to serve people who are in need of endof-life care. It also resolves some of the ethical conflicts and moral distresses many nurses face in current
end-of-life care. This definition has potential to expand roles of nurses in end-of-life care from bedsidedirect care providers to educators and policy makers in their community to assure quality end-of-life care
to all people. Because of our values and philosophy aligning well with end-of-life care, nurses have much tooffer and lead to improve the quality of end-of-life care.
Our definition of end-of-life care is still in draft. We, as faculty in a newly started program ‘‘End-of-Life
Care in Nursing’’ in Japan, explored literature and our nursing values and drafted this definition to use as aframework for our program. To have a clear and empirically valid definition, we will continue to examine itfrom a variety of perspectives. We also look forward to hear from readers of Nursing Ethics to have conversations about end-of-life care and nursing roles.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Dr Billie Severtsen, associate professor at Washington State University College ofNursing, for her comments during the development of this manuscript.

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Funding
This work was supported by the Nippon Foundation (grant number 2010875180).
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
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