-
J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2004
Evaluating palliative care: bereaved family members' evaluations of patients' pain, anxiety and depression.
- Christine J McPherson and Julia M Addington-Hall.
- Department of Palliative Care and Policy (C.J.McP., J.M.A.-H.), Guy's, King's and St. Thomas' School of Medicine, King's College, London, United Kingdom.
- J Pain Symptom Manage. 2004 Aug 1;28(2):104-14.
AbstractPalliative care surveys often rely on bereaved family members to act as proxies to provide information on patient care at the end of life, after the patient's death. However, when comparing bereaved family members' assessments with those of the patients, agreement is found to be better for symptoms that are more concrete and observable than subjective aspects such as psychological symptoms and pain. To date, little is known about how proxies actually evaluate these types of symptoms. The present study used retrospective verbal protocol analysis to elucidate the thought processes of 30 bereaved relatives during their evaluations of patients' pain, anxiety and depression. The qualitative analysis raised awareness of the difficulties experienced by proxies when discerning the presence of symptoms. It also provided insights into the cues and strategies used when making decisions, contributing to a fuller understanding of how proxies distinguish symptoms. Recommendations are made to improve the design of retrospective palliative care surveys.Copyright 2004 U.S. Cancer Pain Relief Committee
Notes
Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?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:

- 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.
.