Palliative & supportive care
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Palliat Support Care · Jun 2016
Terminal delirium misdiagnosed as major psychiatric disorder: Palliative care in a psychiatric inpatient unit.
Delirium is a neuropsychiatric condition characterized by acute change in cognition and disturbance of consciousness. A similar state during the final days of life is termed "terminal delirium." ⋯ Early diagnosis of terminal delirium helps prevent patients, family members, and staff from undergoing severe emotional distress and facilitates appropriate end-of-life care.
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Palliat Support Care · Apr 2016
Individual meaning in life assessed with the Schedule for Meaning in Life Evaluation: toward a circumplex meaning model.
The experience of "meaning in life" (MiL) is a major aspect of life satisfaction and psychological well-being. To assess this highly individual construct, idiographic measures with open-response formats have been developed. However, it can be challenging to categorize these individual experiences for interindividual comparisons. Our study aimed to derive MiL categories from individual listings and develop an integrative MiL model. ⋯ This model seems to incorporate a major portion of individual respondent-generated MiL listings. It may be useful for future idiographic MiL studies to help organize individual experiences of MiL and allow for higher-level interindividual comparisons. Further studies including different samples are necessary to confirm this model or derive other MiL domains, for example, in palliative care patients or patients who are confronted with a loss of meaning.
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Palliat Support Care · Apr 2016
Development and psychometric evaluation of patient needs assessment in palliative care (PNAP) instrument.
Although assessment of palliative patients' needs is a key issue in palliative care, a suitable instrument for identification of such needs is not available in Central European countries. Our objectives were to produce an adequate tool for identifying the importance and satisfaction of palliative patients' needs and to verify its psychometric properties. ⋯ The results of tests on the psychometric properties of the PNAP questionnaire showed at least satisfactory validity and reliability, and it can be employed to assess the needs of palliative care patients in Central European countries.
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Palliat Support Care · Apr 2016
A new measure of home care patients' dignity at the end of life: The Palliative Patients' Dignity Scale (PPDS).
This study aimed to develop a new and brief instrument to be employed in dignity measurement, one based on the perceptions of patients, relatives, and professionals about dignity. ⋯ The new PPDS has appropriate psychometric properties that, together with its briefness, encourages its applicability for dignity assessment at the end of life.
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Palliat Support Care · Apr 2016
Suitability of quality-of-life outcome measures in palliative care in the South African setting.
Quality of life (QoL) is a multidimensional, subjective, and highly individual phenomenon. The current study speaks to the QoL domains identified by palliative patients living in Africa. The need to identify these domains has been recognized but seemed to still be lacking. This study filled this knowledge gap by providing the domains and by giving directions in terms of the assessment of QoL in palliative patients living in resource-restricted communities in South Africa. ⋯ Our study highlights the complexity of QoL and QoL assessment. A more accurate representation of the QoL of palliative patients living in resource-restricted communities might be obtained by using individualized measures or exploring what QoL means to these patients and selecting QoL instruments accordingly.