'The real stuff': implications for nursing of assessing and measuring a terminally ill person's quality of life

Two quality of life (QoL) assessment and measurement tools, the Client Generated Index (CGI) and the McGill Quality of Life (MQOL) questionnaires, were trialled within district nursing palliative care to test usefulness and feasibility for holistic intervention selection, individualized palliative care planning, and measurement of the quality of dying. The specific focus of this paper is to discuss the less tangible outcomes of the trial, which illuminate the partly 'hidden' value and nature of clinical nursing. These outcomes include awareness that the use of such tools may: by actual administration of the tool be, in and of itself, a therapeutic nursing action; focus on 'the real stuff' from the client's perspective, that which matters most to the terminally ill client, but may not be classically considered as prompting nursing intervention; and facilitate 'the real stuff' of nursing, perhaps known but not usually articulated by nurses, and which usually does not feature on care plans nor in time allocation schedules.