• J Palliat Med · Jan 2008

    Relationships among communicative acts, social well-being, and spiritual well-being on the quality of life at the end of life in patients with cancer enrolled in hospice.

    • Maryjo Prince-Paul.
    • Department of Nursing, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio 44106-4904, USA. mxp42@case.edu
    • J Palliat Med. 2008 Jan 1;11(1):20-5.

    BackgroundThe importance of communication in close, personal relationships has been well-documented. At the end of life, communication, social relationships, and spirituality seem to have greater importance. Some studies suggest that the quality of life at the end of life (QOLEOL) involves these components.ObjectiveThe primary aim of this study was to investigate the communicative acts of love, gratitude, and forgiveness, and to explore the extent to which the communicative acts, social well-being, and spiritual well-being predict the overall QOLEOL when controlling for physical symptoms.DesignCross-sectional, descriptive, correlational design.Setting/SubjectsA convenience sample of all adult hospice patients, aged 35-80, with a cancer diagnosis, residing in their private home in a community setting, was recruited from a large, non-profit hospice program in the midwestern United States.MeasurementsPatients completed the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-General (FACT-G) social/family well-being subscale, the JAREL Spiritual Well-Being tool, an investigator-designed tool to measure communicative acts, and the global, single-item QOL indicator of the QUAL-E.ResultsStrong, positive correlations among social and spiritual well-being, communicative acts, and QOLEOL were found (p < 0.01). Spiritual well-being most significantly predicted the QOLEOL, explaining 53.5% of explained variance in the QOLEOL. Although not statistically significant, the communicative acts of love and gratitude made a small contribution to the overall model. The communicative act of forgiveness did not perform well.ConclusionsThe knowledge gained through this investigation laid the groundwork for future studies in identifying the importance of explicitly assessing relationships and supporting patients and families in their communication. In order to learn more about this phenomenon and establish a foundation for intervention, confirmation is required regarding the connections between the spiritual and social domains, the relationships between the specific communicative acts and the QOLEOL, as well as establishment of valid measurement approaches.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…