Written by Helena Voss
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
To examine sensory burden as a potential limit to otherwise beneficial integrative nursing care in adults with advanced illness and to develop a conceptual basis for coordinating touch, sound, light and bedside activity without imposing universal sensory thresholds. Patients with advanced illness may simultaneously experience fatigue, disturbed sleep, pain, psychological distress and changing preferences for interaction. Nursing care, family presence and supportive nonpharmacological interventio
Written by Yuki Sasaki
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
To develop a theoretical account of how palliative nurses can interpret residual symptom burden when complete symptom relief is either unattainable or conflicts with a goal that the patient values more highly. Original non-empirical theory development informed by palliative nursing theory, symptom-management scholarship, patient-preference research, goal-concordant-care literature and evidence concerning serious-illness decision-making. Peer-reviewed nursing, palliative-care and preference-sensi
Written by Carmen Ruiz
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
To examine how everyday identity may be preserved during institutional end-of-life care through personally meaningful rituals, familiar objects, relational continuity, and negotiated nursing routines, while accounting for changing preferences and organizational constraints. Discursive conceptual paper based on a critically selected body of nursing, gerontological, dementia-care, palliative-care, and person-centred-care scholarship. Peer-reviewed literature published between 2017 and 2024 was sel
Written by Oliver Hayes
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
To develop an educational theory explaining how undergraduate nursing students may learn to notice clinically meaningful cues, interpret them in patient-specific context, and select proportionate responses in palliative care without reducing clinical judgment to factual recall or an unvalidated developmental scale. Original non-empirical educational theory informed by critically selected nursing-education, clinical-reasoning, palliative-care and assessment scholarship. Peer-reviewed literature p
Written by Laura Bianchi
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
To examine how community nursing responsibility should be understood when adults with advanced illness are largely confined to home yet continue to value social connection, ordinary roles, and meaningful everyday activity. Home-based palliative and community care can bring professional services into a person’s residence without necessarily improving practical access to valued relationships or activities. Homebound status, symptom burden, mobility restrictions, unequal material resources, changin
Written by Hannah Brooks
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
Sleep disturbance and circadian disruption are common in advanced illness, where pain, dyspnoea, psychological distress, treatment effects, medication exposure, reduced daytime activity, environmental disturbance, and night-time clinical care can interact. Nonpharmacological approaches may be attractive in palliative settings because they can complement symptom management without automatically adding medication burden, yet evidence spans heterogeneous interventions and rarely examines how nursin
Written by Thomas Berger
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
Intimate assistance with toileting, continence, washing, dressing, and related personal care is often unavoidable as serious illness progresses, yet the ethical significance of these encounters is easily obscured when they are treated as routine nursing tasks. Dependence can increase bodily exposure, reduce control over timing and personnel, and intensify vulnerability, while the same assistance may also relieve distress, preserve comfort, and enable patients to remain involved in their own care
Written by Mariana Silva
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
To examine timing as a clinically relevant but underdeveloped dimension of breathlessness management and to develop a theoretical account of how exertion, recovery opportunity, essential nursing activity and patient priorities may be coordinated in advanced illness. Discursive theoretical paper integrating contemporary breathlessness, nursing, rehabilitation, symptom-management and palliative-care scholarship. A critically selected evidence set from 2017–2025 was used to examine chronic and epis
Written by Sarah Thompson
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
To examine how palliative nursing continuity can be sustained when a stable residential address cannot function as the organizing point for follow-up, information exchange, responsibility, and recontact. Original non-empirical service-model development informed by critically selected scholarship on homelessness, palliative and end-of-life care, outreach nursing, service navigation, discharge, integrated care, and continuity. Peer-reviewed evidence published from 2017 to 2025 was selected for dir
Written by Freja Nielsen
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
To develop a method for interpreting missing patient-reported symptom data during remote palliative nursing assessment without treating digital nonresponse as evidence of clinical stability. Remote symptom monitoring can extend palliative assessment beyond scheduled encounters, but it also creates an interpretive problem when an expected patient report is absent. Advanced illness, fluctuating capacity, respondent burden, language, technology access, service workflow and patient preference can al
Written by Min-Jun Kim
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
Therapeutic and caring touch can communicate presence, reassurance and attentiveness during serious illness, yet its ethical acceptability cannot be inferred solely from benevolent intent, prior agreement or the clinical value attributed to the intervention. Serious illness may alter sensory tolerance, communication, bodily vulnerability and the meaning that patients attach to physical contact. This conceptual and normative analysis examines therapeutic touch as an ongoing relational negotiation
Written by Astrid Lindgren
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
To examine how symptom information can lose clinical and personal meaning during nursing handovers in palliative care and to develop a conceptual framework for preserving distinctions among symptom experience, observed change, contextual influences, uncertainty and unfinished follow-up. Original non-empirical discursive paper integrating nursing handover scholarship, palliative-care transition evidence, patient-reported symptom research, documentation studies and communication theory. A critical
Written by Hannah Brooks
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
Recognising that a patient may be dying is an interpretive clinical accomplishment rather than a single-act diagnostic decision. Nursing students must integrate changing physiological, functional, communicative and relational cues while managing uncertainty and the emotional consequences of end-of-life care. Simulation is widely used to prepare students for such encounters, but improvement within a simulated setting cannot be assumed to transfer into clinical recognition of dying. To explain how
Written by Klaus Schmidt
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
To develop a source-aware methodology for AI-assisted nursing documentation that preserves who supplied a clinically meaningful proposition, when the underlying event or statement occurred, whether the proposition represents observation or inference, what uncertainty remains, and who is responsible for correction. Generative artificial intelligence can reduce documentation workload and produce fluent clinical summaries, yet linguistic fluency can conceal changes in epistemic status. This problem
Written by Giulia Romano
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
To define the epistemic limits of artificial intelligence (AI) when symptom-related information from nonverbal adults receiving palliative care is transformed from observable behavior into claims about subjective suffering. Patients who cannot reliably communicate may express distress through facial activity, movement, vocalization, physiological change and contextual alterations recognized by caregivers or clinicians. Structured observational instruments and emerging AI systems can improve dete
Written by Sipho Dlamini
Published on Issue 2 Vol 7, 2026
Continuous physiological monitoring can retain clinical value near the end of life, yet its informational benefits may diminish or become disproportionate when technological surveillance disturbs rest, reinforces treatment-oriented routines, or conflicts with a patient's priorities for comfort. Decisions to reduce monitoring therefore carry a distinctive nursing-ethical problem: removing or scaling back a technology can be appropriate while withdrawal of nursing attention, symptom observatio
