Nurses have always advocated for their patients “quality of life”, but what exactly does quality of life means? According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, it “is described as a state of well-being with many measurable components to it such as, the standard of living, amount of money, and access to goods and services”. However, other elements such as freedom, happiness, art, environmental health, and innovation are far more difficult to measure yet are perhaps equally more important in defining one’s quality of life (United Nation’s 2005).

In today’s health care, the issue of a patient's quality of life is particularly important and ultimately decisions on which treatments to use are made closely related to assessing cost effectiveness and is often associated with the idea of putting a monetary value on life (The Economist’s 2005).

We need to ask the question "could it be worth living depending on the individual way of life or life style whether adding on life or depleting it and disgracing human life and society itself?"

Having worked in extended care facilities at both Langley Memorial Hospital and Surrey Memorial Hospital for the past sixteen years has given me opportunity to be involved in this crucial decision. Each patient’s care must be assessed individually and often the most difficult are the residence who are in “vegetative states”. Regardless of the different cases, each comes with the ethical dilemma of how each of us, as nurses, truly advocate for their quality of life.

The debate on quality of life is centuries old, notably dating back to Aristotle, noted in his Nicomacheans Ethics and eventually settling the notion of eudaimonia, a Greek term often translated as happiness. Neoligism liveability (or livability), from the adjective liveable, is an abstract noun now often applied to the built environment or a town or a city, meaning its overall contribution to the quality of life of inhabitants (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

Today, quality of life is particularly important in health care, since decisions on what treatments to invest the most are closely related to their effect of patient’s quality of life (The Economist’s 2005).