Journal of pain and symptom management
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2024
"At Least I Can Push this Morphine":PICU Nurses' Approaches to Suffering Among Dying Children.
Parents of children who die in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) carry memories of their child's suffering throughout a lifelong grieving experience. Given their prolonged time at the bedside, PICU nurses are poised to attend to dying children's suffering. ⋯ While physical suffering may be remedied with direct nursing care, holistically attending to EOL suffering in the PICU requires both bolstering external processes and strengthening PICU nurses' internal resources. Improving psychosocial training and optimizing interprofessional care systems could better support dying children and their families.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2024
Mechanical ventilation in older adults with dementia: opportunities to promote goal-concordant care.
Recent studies show increasing use of mechanical ventilation among people living with dementia. There are concerns that this trend may not be driven by patient preferences. ⋯ Future efforts to promote goal-concordant care surrounding mechanical ventilation use for people living with dementia should involve identifying barriers to goal-concordant care in pre-hospital settings, assessing the timeliness of in-hospital GOCD, and developing strategies for in-the-moment crisis communication across settings.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2024
Global Assessment of Palliative Care Need: Serious Health-Related Suffering Measurement Methodology.
Inequities and gaps in palliative care access are a serious impediment to health systems especially in low- and middle-income countries and the accurate measurement of need across health conditions is a critical step to understanding and addressing the issue. Serious Health-related Suffering (SHS) is a novel methodology to measure the palliative care need and was originally developed by The Lancet Commission on Global Access to Palliative Care and Pain Relief. In 2015, the first iteration - SHS 1.0 - was estimated at over 61 million people worldwide experiencing at least 6 billion days of SHS annually as a result of life-limiting and life-threatening conditions. ⋯ The methodology encompasses opportunities for applying SHS to future policy making assessment of future research priorities particularly in light of the dearth of data from low- and middle-income countries, and sharing of directions for future work to develop SHS 3.0.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2024
ReviewThe wish to hasten death in patients with life-limiting conditions. A systematic overview.
A systematic review of the wish to hasten death among people with life-limiting conditions was published in 2011. Since then, other reviews and primary studies have been published that have added to knowledge regarding the conceptual definition, aetiology and assessment of the wish to hasten death. ⋯ This overview underscores the need for clinical strategies that can identify different manifestations of the wish to hasten death among people with life-limiting conditions.