Journal of pain and symptom management
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It is challenging to provide supportive intensive care to infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), giving them every chance for survival, while also trying to minimize suffering for both the infant and parents. Parents who believe their infant is suffering may alter treatment goals based on their perceptions; however, it is unknown how parents come to believe that their infant may be suffering. ⋯ Parents used signs exhibited by infants, as well as information they received from the health care team to form their perceptions of suffering. Perceived suffering followed different trajectories and influenced the decisions that parents made for their infant. Soliciting parent perspectives may lead to improvements in the understanding of infant well-being, particularly suffering, as well as how parents rely on these perceptions to make treatment decisions for their infant.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · May 2020
Advanced Cancer Patients' Changes in Accurate Prognostic Understanding and Their Psychological Well-Being.
Clinicians often worry that patients' recognition of the terminal nature of their illness may impair psychological well-being. ⋯ Improved PU may be associated with initial decrements in psychological well-being, followed by patients rebounding to baseline levels. Concerns about lasting psychological harm may not need to be a deterrent to having prognostic discussions with patients.
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There is much in the literature about the benefits of reflective writing for medical practitioners. This article outlines instructions for a novel reflective writing exercise that anyone can do, gives examples for how the exercise has been helpful for the author, and then relates an interdisciplinary discussion that resulted from the use of this exercise when paired with a prompt.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · May 2020
Missed opportunities of integration of palliative care: frequency, causes and profile of missed visits in an Oncologic Palliative Care Outpatient Unit.
Many patients with cancer are referred to palliative care (PC) outpatient clinics but do not attend consultations, which increases the difficultly of integrating PC in a timely manner. ⋯ Approximately one-third of patients eligible for PC miss the opportunity to be included earlier; only 18% of them are consulted later. Use of standardized referral protocols may help to reduce these absence rates.
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PC-FACS (FastArticleCriticalSummaries forClinicians 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 PCFACS, please encourage them to join the AAHPM at aahpm.org. Comments from readers are welcomed at pcfacs@aahpm.org.