Introduction: Inevitably, every life cycle brings a person to death. Constant medical technological progress cannot change this fact. The most efficient and advanced methods and techniques only prolong patients' life regardless of its quality. In order to avoid such state, persons can, in full consciousness, make a statement of pre-expressed will and care, thus protecting their own autonomy. It is vital that at the end of each person's life, quality nursing care is provided and that the wishes and values of the person expressed in advance are taken into account. Nurses can protect patient's autonomy during patient care when said autonomy is compromised by the influence of patient's family members or medical treat-ment. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to present nurses' experience with the auto-nomy of patients' decision-making on end-of-life care and care at death. Methods: A des-criptive method of work with a review of professional and scientific literature was used. Literature in the freely accessible Medline and CINAHL databases and the Internet archive of the Review of Nursing and Oncology for the period of five years was searched. Litera-ture was searched in the period from October 2019 to January 2020. English keywords were used, combined with the Boolean operator AND. 21 professional articles were inc-luded in the analysis. Article quality was assessed using the CASP system. One book was used as an additional source, The Code of Ethics in Nursing and Care of Slovenia and the Patients' Rights Act. Results: It has been found that patients' autonomy can be compromi-sed by both medical and family paternalism. Despite the pre-existing will, this is not taken into account due to other persons' interests. Nurses have an important role to play in protec-ting patient's autonomy and creating a comfortable environment as they are the ones who take care of a dying patient. Discussion and conclusion: Pre-expressed will and care pro-ved to be positive in deciding on medical procedures in end-of-life patients. Even though nurses themselves do not independently engage in conversations about pre-expressed will and end-of-life care, they do believe that end-of-life care is more manageable when the patient's wishes and values are known. In practice, fear of doctor's authoritative position is still very much present.
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