Journal of pain and symptom management
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Nov 2015
Increasing the Number of Outpatients Receiving Spiritual Assessment: A Pain and Palliative Care Service Quality Improvement Project.
Spirituality is a patient need that requires special attention from the Pain and Palliative Care Service team. This quality improvement project aimed to provide spiritual assessment for all new outpatients with serious life-altering illnesses. ⋯ Improved spiritual assessment in an outpatient palliative care clinic setting can occur with a multidisciplinary approach. This project also identifies data collection and documentation processes that can be targeted for improvement.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Nov 2015
Multicenter Study Observational StudyValidation of the Japanese Version of Edmonton Symptom Assessment System-Revised.
The Edmonton Symptom Assessment System-revised (ESAS-r) is a brief and widely used symptom measurement tool. ⋯ The Japanese version of the ESAS-r is a reliable and valid tool for measuring symptoms in Japanese adult patients with cancer.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Nov 2015
ReviewRecommendations to Surrogates at the End of Life: A Critical Narrative Review of the Empirical Literature and a Normative Analysis.
Physician recommendations have historically been a part of shared decision making. Recent literature has challenged the idea that physician recommendations should be part of shared decision making at the end of life, particularly the making of recommendations to surrogates of incapacitated patients. Close examination of the studies and the available data on surrogate preferences for decisional authority at the end of life, however, provide an empirical foundation for a style of shared decision making that includes a physician recommendation. Moreover, there are independent ethical reasons for arguing that physician recommendations enhance rather than detract from shared decision making.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Nov 2015
Comparative StudyNursing Home Staff Palliative Care Knowledge and Practices: Results of a Large Survey of Front-Line Workers.
Deficits in quality end-of-life care for nursing home (NH) residents are well known. Palliative care is promoted as an approach to improve quality. The Palliative Care Survey (PCS) is designed to measure NH staff palliative care knowledge and practice. ⋯ Given observed differences in palliative care practice and knowledge scores by staff training, it appears the PCS is a useful tool to assess NH staff. Low end-of-life knowledge scores represent an important target for quality improvement.