-
Support Care Cancer · Dec 2004
Multicenter StudyConcerns of family members of patients receiving palliative sedation therapy.
- Tatsuya Morita, Masayuki Ikenaga, Isamu Adachi, Itaru Narabayashi, Yoshiyuki Kizawa, Yoshifumi Honke, Hiroyuki Kohara, Taketo Mukaiyama, Tatsuo Akechi, Yukie Kurihara, Yosuke Uchitomi, and Japan Pain, Rehabilitation, Palliative Medicine, and Psycho-Oncology (J-PRPP) Study Group.
- Palliative Care Team and Seirei Hospice, Seirei Mikatabara Hospital, 3453 Mikatabara-cho, 433-8558 Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, Japan. seireihc@jt6.so-net.ne.jp
- Support Care Cancer. 2004 Dec 1;12(12):885-9.
PurposeSymptomatic sedation is often required in terminally ill cancer patients and could cause significant distress to their families. The aim of this study was to gather vivid family descriptions about their experiences in palliative sedation therapy.MethodsThis report is an additional analysis of a multicenter questionnaire survey. We performed content analysis on 48 statements described by 185 bereaved family members of patients who received palliative sedation therapy.ResultsFamily members reported guilt, helplessness, and physical and emotional exhaustion when patients received palliative sedation therapy. They were concerned about whether sedated patients experienced distress, wished to know that the maximum efforts had been made, wished to prepare for patient death, wished to tell important things to patients before sedation, wished to understand patients' suffering, and wanted medical professionals to treat patients with dignity.ConclusionsTo alleviate family distress, clinicians should understand families' emotional distress, ensure that unconscious patients feel no distress, reassure family members that the symptoms are truly refractory despite maximum efforts for symptom relief, give information and coordinate the situation to enable families to prepare for patient death and to tell important things to patients before sedation, help families to share patients' suffering, and treat patients the same as when they remained conscious.
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:
![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.
.