Journal of pain and symptom management
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Oct 2015
Symptom Expression in the Last Seven Days of Life Among Cancer Patients Admitted to Acute Palliative Care Units.
The symptom burden in the last week of life of patients with advanced cancer has not been well characterized. ⋯ Despite intensive management in APCUs, some cancer patients continue to experience high symptom burden as they approached death.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Oct 2015
Religion, Spirituality, and the Hidden Curriculum: Medical Student and Faculty Reflections.
Religion and spirituality play an important role in physicians' medical practice, but little research has examined their influence within the socialization of medical trainees and the hidden curriculum. ⋯ Religion/spirituality has a largely unstudied but possibly influential role in medical student socialization. Future study is needed to characterize its function within the hidden curriculum.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Oct 2015
A Pilot Study of a Mobile Health Pain Coping Skills Training Protocol for Patients with Persistent Cancer Pain.
Pain coping skills training (PCST) interventions have shown efficacy for reducing pain and providing other benefits in patients with cancer. However, their reach is often limited because of a variety of barriers (e.g., travel, physical burden, cost, time). ⋯ The use of mHealth technology is a feasible and acceptable option for delivery of PCST for patients with cancer. This delivery mode is likely to dramatically increase intervention access for cancer patients with pain compared to traditional in-person delivery. Preliminary data also suggest that the program is likely to produce pretreatment to post-treatment decreases in pain and other important outcomes.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Oct 2015
Caregiver Expectations: Predictors of a Worse Than Expected Caregiving Experience at the End of Life.
The gap between informal caregivers' expectations of caregiving at the end of life and their actual caregiving experience has important affective and behavioral consequences. ⋯ Caregiver expectations represent a novel and important focus for investigation into the caregiver experience. Explicitly eliciting expectations may in future lead to ways of better supporting caregivers.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Oct 2015
Palliative Care Medical Education in European Universities: A Descriptive Study and Numerical Scoring System Proposal for Assessing Educational Development.
The lack of palliative medicine (PM) education has been identified as a barrier to the development of the discipline. A number of international institutions have called for its implementation within undergraduate medical curricula. ⋯ PM is taught in a substantial number of undergraduate medical programs at European universities, and a qualified teaching structure is emerging; however, there is a wide variation in the level of PM educational development between individual countries.