Palliative & supportive care
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Palliat Support Care · Dec 2010
Impact on caregiver burden of a patient-focused palliative care intervention for patients with advanced cancer.
Caregivers of patients with advanced cancer experience physical and emotional strain that can raise their own risk for morbidity and mortality. This analysis was performed to determine whether ENABLE II, a patient-focused palliative care intervention that increased patients' quality of life, reduced symptom intensity, and lowered depressed mood compared to usual care, would affect caregiver burden. ⋯ The results indicate that a successful patient-focused intervention did not have a similar beneficial effect on caregiver burden. Future interventions should focus on caregivers as well as patients, with particular attention to caregivers' perceptions of patient care, and seek to change both negative and positive effects of informal caregiving.
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Palliat Support Care · Dec 2010
Transforming the mortality review conference to assess palliative care in the acute care setting: a feasibility study.
This project sought to evaluate the impact of a hospital-based Palliative Care Consultation (PCC) service utilizing a common practice: the resident mortality review conference. ⋯ The mortality review process was found to be valuable in assessing care delivery for patients near the end of life. The tool yielded results that were consistent with findings of other studies looking at pain and symptom management, advance care planning, and the rate of palliative care consults across major diagnostic categories, supporting the face validity of the mortality review process.
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Palliat Support Care · Dec 2010
What does care mean? Perceptions of people approaching the end of life.
This project sought to better understand the nature of medical care from the perspective of people approaching the end of life. ⋯ The importance of care was clearly illustrated through descriptions of the benefits of caring behavior and the negative consequences of uncaring behavior. In order to demonstrate the empathy and compassion expected and assumed of medical graduates and engender a feeling of being cared for among their patients, doctors need to invite and develop a relationship with those they are caring for. There needs to be a focus on each member of the caring relationship primarily as individual human beings.
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Palliat Support Care · Sep 2010
Multicenter Study Comparative StudyMaking sense of health and illness in palliative care: volunteers' perspectives.
To encourage communication and contribute to the palliative care movement's need for interdisciplinary care, this article offers to explore the stance of volunteers on two fundamental concepts, "health" and "illness," as well as their related understanding of "palliative care." Volunteers' understandings are then compared with the concepts put forth by the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association (CHPCA) in its "Model to Guide Hospice Palliative Care." ⋯ Participants describe illness as a destabilizing loss and palliative care as a means to compensate for the numerous consequences this loss brings; their actions reflect these principles and are compatible with the CHPCA model.