Palliative Nurse Lorri C. Jackson Recently Featured on Close Up Radio

LA MESA, CA, UNITED STATES, October 13, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — A 2025 survey of 1,000 registered nurses by Joyce University found that 74% feel emotionally drained more than once a week. What’s worse, more than half regularly skip meals or breaks just to keep up. Lorri Jackson, MSN, RN, has spent years guiding patients and families through end-of-life care and has lived every one of those numbers. In two interviews with Close Up Radio, she was candid about what it took to change course.

Jackson, a palliative and hospice nurse educator based in San Diego, built her career on some of medicine’s hardest conversations. She sits with families as they weigh resuscitation, decide between hospice or continued treatment, and decipher what a loved one actually wants when doctors disagree. She calls her work “a new language about end-of-life talk,” that most nurses are never trained to speak.

“You have to build trust,” Jackson said, describing how she opens a “goals-of-care” conversation with each patient and the family. She starts by asking the patient what quality of life means, and then reads through advance directives to make sure decisions will reflect what the patient actually wants, rather than what a relative assumes.

That instinct to protect what matters most eventually turned inward. Jackson recalled learning about a hospital social worker roughly her own age who died alone at her desk on a night shift, found only after her coworkers noticed something was wrong. That story stayed with her.

“I don’t want to work to die,” Jackson said. “I want to work to live.”

For years, she also skipped her 10-minute breaks and worked through lunch to avoid staying late to chart, a habit she now recognizes as a direct path to burnout and compassion fatigue (the same conditions Joyce University’s survey found nearly three in four nurses experiencing weekly). Jackson now insists on her full, uninterrupted lunch, with her cellphone parked at the nursing station, patients handed off to a colleague, with no exceptions for doctors who “will push you till the end.”

Jackson said that shift in boundaries is part of what drew her toward a venue change with a move to southern Utah, where she has taken a pay cut to work as a hospice case manager. Without hesitation, she said, the tradeoff was worth it.

“I will make half what I make right now,” she said, “but I am going to be happy.”

Jackson brings that same directness into the classroom, where she trains younger nurses who often carry guilt over administering end-of-life medication, worried that easing a patient’s breathing in their final hours amounts to hastening death. She teaches these nurses the clinical reality. “Morphine given for air hunger is comfort care, not harm,” she explained. She encourages nurses to use tools like the respiratory distress observation scale, which helps read pain and fear in patients who are unable to describe their own symptoms.

Jackson said the newest generation of nurses entered the profession with less hands-on training than those before them. She traces this gap partly to pandemic-era restrictions that kept students out of hospitals during clinical rotations. Joyce University’s survey found a related pattern, with Gen Z nurses reporting the highest rate of daily emotional exhaustion of any generation surveyed, at 28%.

Jackson said families increasingly turn to her when they sense a loved one is being discharged before being ready, often driven by financial pressure on hospitals rather than clinical readiness. “They just feel that their loved one is just being pushed out,” she said of what families tell her, adding that her department exists to give them a direct line to answers, as well as palliative care.

She also draws on a deeply personal chapter of her own life. Jackson cared for her father through nearly two and a half years on hospice as Parkinson’s disease slowly took his independence. She managed the process while working full time and helping her aging mother. She said watching her father die on his own terms, at home, surrounded by family and a chaplain who talked football with him, taught her more about dignity than any classroom ever could.

“He was able to die his way,” Jackson said. “And for that, I am extremely proud.”

Jackson said the smallest gestures from patients and families, such as a simple thank you, still move her after years in the field. “Not everybody cares,” she said, “and there needs to be more love in this world.”

About Lorri Jackson, RN.

Lorri Jackson is a registered nurse who works in palliative and end-of-life care in Utah, where her role as a hospice case manager includes nurse educator, goals-of-care conversations with patients and families, and advance care planning. Watching the aftermath of the September 11 attacks during a human anatomy class drew her toward helping people facing critical illness. Over the course of her nursing career, she has worked across several departments before finding her focus in palliative care.

Jackson describes herself as a country girl at heart and traces her roots to Oklahoma. She has spoken publicly about caring for her father, who lived with Parkinson’s disease and was on hospice care for more than two and a half years before his death in 2023.

Close Up Radio recently featured Lorri C. Jackson, MSN, RN, in a two-part interview with Jim Masters on Friday October 9th at 2pm Eastern, and with Doug Llewelyn on Friday October 16th at 2pm Eastern

Listen to the Podcast
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-1-close-up-radio-spotlights-palliative-nurse-lorri/id1785721253?i=1000795885674
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-close-up-radio-242020413/episode/part-1-close-up-radio-spotlights-palliative-nurse-lorri-c-jackson-347440525
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3TF49I9PZKom9oL5J0QHNx

For more information about Lorri C. Jackson, MSN, RN, please visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorri-jackson-8963a865/

Lou Ceparano
Close Up Television & Radio
+1 631-850-3314
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Written By: EIN Presswire