Nurses unaware of their own role and more especially of the consequence of their own actions on patients: this disturbing situation emerges from a survey conducted by a group of researchers at the University of Maastricht. Its results were delivered to Ross-van Dorp, Secretary of State of the Netherlands, in recent days. Out of a total 1500 nurses interviewed, 86% admitted they did not know in detail the consequences of their own actions, or, more especially, the law that regulates their relation with the patient. It also emerges from the research that communication between doctors and nurses is poor and undoubtedly inadequate to the delicacy of the field of intervention. The situation is further aggravated in the case of patients being treated at home, where superficiality and ignorance of the effects and nature of the drugs administered are all the greater. The report, which has re-ignited the debate in the country, is one of the results of the five committees established by former Prime Minister Borst in 1998 in response to some parliamentary questions that even then had pointed to the fact that in 60% of cases recourse to euthanasia was not explicitly declared.
