Fundamentals of Nursing Q 238
Miss Mary, an 88-year old woman, believes that life should not be prolonged when hope is gone. She has decided that she does not want extraordinary measures taken when her life is at its end. Because she feels this way, she has talked with her daughter about her desires, completing a living will, and left directions with her physician. This is an example of:
A. Affirming a value
B. Choosing a value
C. Prizing a value
D. Reflecting a value
Correct Answer: C. Prizing a value.
The alternative goal of value awareness is enabling patients to achieve their desired balance between rational and nonrational decision-making, allowing them to be as rational as they can and want to be. That means doing everything possible to make the critical issues clear, thereby expanding the envelope of potentially rational decision-making.
Option A: Nurses engaged with mortality through a process of recognition and through the affirmation of their values. The affirmed values are aligned with the palliative care approach and within the ethics of finitude lens in that their enactment is partly premised on the recognition of patients’ accumulated losses related to human facticities (social, temporal, mortal).
Option B: Advance directives treat patients (and their surrogates) as rational actors, who will choose the option with the highest expected utility if provided needed information. The rational actor model assumes well-formulated decisions, with each option (e.g., treatment) represented as a vector of expected outcomes (e.g., pain, anxiety, life expectancy) that a decision-maker can weigh by relative importance.
Option D: Reflection brings learning to life. Reflective practice helps learners find relevancy and meaning in a lesson and make connections between educational experiences and real-life situations. It increases insight and creates pathways to future learning. Reflection is called by many different names in the education field including processing, reviewing, and debriefing.