Journal of pain and symptom management
-
Accurate prognostication is challenging in the setting of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, due to rapidly changing data, studies that are not generalizable, and lack of morbidity and functional outcomes in survivors. To provide meaningful guidance to patients, existing mortality data must be considered and appropriately applied. Although most people infected with SARS-CoV-2 will recover, mortality increases with age and comorbidity in those who develop severe illness.
-
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 PCFACS, please encourage them to join the AAHPM at aahpm.org. Comments from readers are welcomed at pcfacs@aahpm.org.
-
The importance of advance care planning (ACP) has been increasingly recognized by health systems. However, 46%-76% of patients report engaging in ACP with lawyers, whereas only a minority report doing so with physicians. In the U. ⋯ Aligning medical and legal approaches to ACP is important to ensuring the quality and value of those efforts. As an important first step toward this goal, we convened an interprofessional panel of medical and legal experts to elucidate the state of medical-legal ACP and begin to identify strategies to improve and align practices within and across professions. This article describes the historical disconnects between the medical and legal practice of ACP, recommendations and products of the interprofessional panel, and recommendations for future medical-legal collaboration.
-
J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2020
Observational StudyAssessment of the Decision-Making Capacity for Clinical Research Participation in Patients with Advanced Cancer in the Last Weeks of Life.
Few studies have examined how clinicians assess decision-making capacity for research in the last weeks of life. ⋯ Most patients in the palliative and supportive care unit lacked decision-making capacity for participation in clinical research. Clinician impression had high accuracy. Few patients with normal MDAS were found to be incapable with MacCAT-CR assessment.
-
J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2020
Psychometric evaluation of the patient-related Nausea and Vomiting Management Barriers Questionnaire (NVMBQ).
The Nausea and Vomiting Management Barriers Questionnaire (NVMBQ) measures patient-related barriers to antiemetic medication. ⋯ The NVMBQ provides a good basis for assessing patient-related barriers to chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting management. We will use the resulting and translated NVMBQ in a larger study to assess the relationships between chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, patient-related barriers, and current antiemetic regimens.