Introduction:

Faced with the ability to maintenance vital functions artificially, new ethical concerns arise among health professionals regarding death. It is been questioned from ethics if the care team should always do everything necessary and possible to prevent the death of a patient.

Objective:

to analyze the bioethical aspects of limiting therapeutic effort in end-of-life patients, encourage reflection and contribute to improving end-of-life care.

Method:

a narrative and integrative review of the scientific literature was performed by searching for publications in meta-search engines and databases of PubMed, SciELO and the journal of Nursing Ethics. A total of 6,325 studies published since 2018 were identified and a total of 9 articles were included.

Results/Discussion:

Issues presented by professionals regarding making-decisions at the end of life, the need to improve training in ethics and aspects related to patients in their last days, palliative care and the limitation of therapeutic effort are described. Only a minority of studies are focused on nursing.

Conclusions:

professional's decisions are influenced by values, emotions, beliefs and experiences, which, together with the difficulty that sometimes exists to establish an accurate clinical diagnosis, makes it difficult to limit therapeutic effort. It is therefore necessary to improve training in ethics and knowledge about end-of-life processes from professionals.

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