Do you think it is appropriate for a hospice nurse to hint around at how much of a patient’s medication it would take to kill them?

Over there a hospice nurse hinting at how much medication could kill a patient would breach basic suicide prevention and professional boundary protocols that certainly all hospitals and hospice programs follow, even if it’s framed as a joke or “hypothetical.”

Nurses are explicitly prohibited from suggesting methods, dosages, or feasibility of ending one’s life outside a extremely narrow, formal, physician led legal process, and casual or unsolicited comments like that violate nursing ethics, hospice communication standards, and risk management rules. It can , very easily, result in revoking their licenses.

And it is of course not appropriate socially no matter their reasons or the context.

Most countries, not just the US, legally bind health practitioners to never initiate such conversations. It is something you provide answers to not directly or indirectly suggest without others stepping in first to ask.


A healthy person doesn't feel entitled to deciding the length of someone else's life. Even more so if they work in healthcare. If there are people like that, they should quit and work in a slaughter house instead. What is even the point in providing healthcare if one doesn't value life in general?