Patient education and counseling
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General practitioners' (GPs') anti-smoking advice promotes patients' smoking cessation but little is known about how GPs use their short consultations to give advice. We used semi-structured interviews with 27 UK GPs to investigate how GPs believe they should advise smokers to stop and the reasons underpinning these beliefs. ⋯ They also reported using confrontational advice-giving styles with patients who continued to smoke despite suffering from smoking-related illnesses. GPs might find it easier and more rewarding to discuss smoking with patients if they possessed a greater range of skills for dealing with non-motivated smokers.
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Clinical Trial Controlled Clinical Trial
The impact of preoperative information on state anxiety, postoperative pain and satisfaction with pain management.
The primary objective of this study was to test whether specific information given prior to surgery can help patients obtain better pain relief after total knee arthroplasty (TKA). Secondary objectives were to study the impact of preoperative information on state and trait anxiety, satisfaction with pain management and satisfaction with nursing care. The study was an intervention study with two groups of equal size (n=30). ⋯ Pain assessments were made preoperatively and every 3h for the first three postoperative days, using the visual analogue scale (VAS). The results of this study suggest that information does influence the experience of pain after surgery and related psychological factors. The postoperative pain declined more rapidly for patients in the treatment group, the degree of preoperative state anxiety was lower and they were more satisfied with the postoperative pain management.
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Information about medical decision-making in the last stage of life and the wishes of terminally ill patients is scarce. At two hospital departments, we observed 16 multidisciplinary meetings and recorded 110 discussions concerning 74 patients. Thirty-three of these discussions concerned either starting or forgoing potentially life-prolonging therapy or applying potentially life-shortening medical interventions. ⋯ Potentially life-shortening decisions were never made if patients were known to disagree. No decisions about physician-assisted death were made. The study shows that medical end-of-life decisions are commonly shared between the involved caregivers and the patients.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study Clinical Trial
The effect of decision aids on the agreement between women's and physicians' decisional conflict about hormone replacement therapy.
The aim of this secondary analysis was to compare the effects of a tailored decision aid (DA) with those of a pamphlet on the agreement between women's and physicians' decisional conflict about hormone replacement therapy (HRT). A total of 40 physicians and 184 women provided data. ⋯ When the average score of decisional conflict of women nested within a physician and of each physician were used, the ICC for the DA group and the pamphlet group was 0.41 (95% CI=-0.04 to 0.72) and 0.06 (95% CI=-0.41 to 0.49), respectively. Compared to pamphlets, DAs appear to improve the agreement between women's and physicians' decisional conflict about HRT.
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Patient centered palliative cancer care would imply, first, the introduction of psychosocial endpoints when evaluating treatment and making decisions. Second, patient control would have to be enhanced by information giving and increased decision involvement. We have indicated that paradoxes exist when a patient centered approach is advocated in the context of palliative cancer care. ⋯ Patients wishing to maintain hope and avoid emotional impact of a full understanding of their prognosis may rather not be informed brusquely about prognosis or the aims of supportive therapy and forced to make an informed decision. However, by giving more aggressive, maybe even futile, treatment, and withholding supportive care patients may receive less than 'quality end-of-life care'. Therefore, information about less intrusive strategies should still be given in a cautious manner, while regarding the patient's defenses respectfully.