In healthcare, there are various nursing policies being used with patients. One of these policies is Do Not Resuscitate – order. DNR order is compiled by the doctors orders or by the patients own wish. DNR order is legitimate when the patients condition has progressed into a situation where CPR would more likely cause more harm than good.

We have chosen our thesis from the thesis bank. Our thesis is a narrative literature review, for it is a great tool for gathering information from already existing researches. We searched infor-mation about DNR order and ethical challenges concerning the nursing of a DNR patient. Our goal was to find out how the DNR order affects the patients nursing in general.

The databases used on our thesis were Ebsco CINAHL, Ebsco Academic Search Elite, PubMed, Wiley Online Library, Medic and Elsevier. The researches were chosen based on intake- and exlusion criteria, and 6 researches were chosen for this literature review.

There were only a few comprehensive studies on the subject from over the last 25 years. From the researches chosen for our thesis, it was found out that the DNR order causes ethical chal-lenges in nursing care of the patient. There were differences observed in the attitudes and course of action amongst doctors and nurses when they faced a DNR – patient. There were exarcebated situations where the doctor refused to talk about resuscitation with the patient because he felt the situation uncomfortable for himself. It was revealed that the nursing of the DNR patients was limited mainly to fulfilling and taking care of their physical needs, with no attention paid to the mental health. It turned out from the researches that the nursing staff would like to have more education and information from studies regarding the nursing of a dying patient. The greatest chal-lenges concerning the ethical challenges in nursing and the DNR order were related to informing and decision-making.

Modern day nursing is evidence-based performance, and for increasing the quality of the nursing of DNR – patients we would need more studies on the subject.