Journal of pain and symptom management
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2024
Leadership's perceptions of palliative care during the COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative study.
Palliative care (PC) played a leading role in the COVID-19 pandemic. However, little is known regarding health system leadership's perceptions. ⋯ Our findings suggest that healthcare leadership increasingly understands the value of PC and its critical role within the health system and during future public health emergencies; this was further reinforced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare leadership recognizes and highlights the need to increase investments in this specialty, both financially and educationally. In doing so, healthcare costs will be lowered, patient satisfaction will increase, and care will be better coordinated.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2024
Creating a Palliative Care Clinic for Patients with Cancer Pain and Substance Use Disorder.
Opioids are a first-line treatment for severe cancer pain. However, clinicians may be reluctant to prescribe opioids for patients with concurrent substance use disorders (SUD) or clinical concerns about non-prescribed substance use. ⋯ The formal collaboration with addiction psychiatry and the integration of harm reduction principles and practices into ambulatory palliative care improved our ability to provide treatment to a previously underserved patient population with high symptom burden.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2024
Attitudes and beliefs regarding Pain Medicine: results of a national palliative physician survey.
Pain is a prevalent symptom in patients with serious illness and often requires interventional approaches for adequate treatment. Little is known about referral patterns and collaborative attitudes of palliative physicians regarding pain management specialists. ⋯ This study shows that Palliative Care physicians have highly positive attitudes toward Pain Medicine specialists, but referrals remain low. Facilitating professional collaboration via joint educational/clinical sessions is one possible solution to drive ongoing interprofessional care in patients with complex pain.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2024
Symptom-BERT: Enhancing Cancer Symptom Detection in EHR Clinical Notes.
Extracting cancer symptom documentation allows clinicians to develop highly individualized symptom prediction algorithms to deliver symptom management care. Leveraging advanced language models to detect symptom data in clinical narratives can significantly enhance this process. ⋯ This study underscores the transformative potential of specialized pretraining on domain-specific data in boosting the performance of language models for medical applications. The Symptom-BERT model's exceptional efficacy in detecting cancer symptoms heralds a groundbreaking stride in patient-centered AI technologies, offering a promising path to elevate symptom management and cultivate superior patient self-care outcomes.
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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.