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
Enhancing Communication Related to Symptom Management Through Plain Language: A Brief Report.
Symptom management is a key dimension of palliative care. In addition to aspects such as assessment and pharmacological management of symptoms, professionals also require communication skills to effectively manage symptoms in serious illness. ⋯ Provider training with the tool produced increased plain language. Use of the tool in provider education shows promise in increasing the health literacy for patients and families regarding symptom management.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Nov 2015
Determinants of Hospital Death for Taiwanese Pediatric Cancer Decedents, 2001-2010.
Factors influencing pediatric cancer patients' place of death may have evolved with advances in medical and hospice care since earlier studies were done. ⋯ Taiwanese pediatric cancer patients predominantly died in an acute care hospital with a slightly increasing trend of shifting place of death from home to hospital. Propensity for hospital death was determined by residential urbanization level, diagnosis, primary physician's specialty, and the primary hospital's characteristics and health care resources. Clinical interventions and health policies should ensure that resources are allocated to allow pediatric cancer patients to die in the place they and their parents prefer to achieve a good death and promote their parents' bereavement adjustment.
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PC-FACS(FastArticleCriticalSummaries for Clinicians inPalliativeCare) provides hospice and palliative care clinicians with concise summaries of the most important findings from more than 100 medical and scientific journals. If you have colleagues who would benefit from receiving PC-FACS, please encourage them to join the AAHPM at aahpm.org. Comments from readers are welcomed at pc-facs@aahpm.org.