Journal of pain and symptom management
-
J Pain Symptom Manage · Sep 2024
"Life…Gets Turned Upside-Down…" Opportunities to Improve Palliative Care for High-Grade Glioma.
Early palliative care referral is recommended broadly in oncology. Yet, few patients with high-grade gliomas (HGG) - highly aggressive brain tumors - receive specialty palliative care consultation. ⋯ Patients with HGG have unique palliative care needs that affect palliative care delivery across care domains. Bidirectional education, enhanced collaboration, and consensus guidelines may help overcome barriers to specialty palliative care referral.
-
J Pain Symptom Manage · Sep 2024
Changes Due to Patient Deaths: Medical Students' Expectations vs. Health Professionals' Experiences.
Preparing healthcare professionals for inevitable encounters with patient deaths is crucial to preventing maladaptive professional bereavement outcomes. ⋯ In general, students tend to overestimate the long-term impacts of patient deaths. However, approximately 1/4 of students hold overly optimistic expectations, which are predicted by motivations to study medicine and death attitudes.
-
J Pain Symptom Manage · Sep 2024
Implementing the Serious Illness Care Program in Safety Net Health Systems: a qualitative study.
Interventions to improve the quality of care for people affected by serious illness commonly fail to reach patients from marginalized and underserved communities, which include those characterized by racialized or indigenous identity, sexual and gender minority status, and rural living. Interventions to improve care through serious illness conversations have demonstrated benefit, but little is known about their implementation in health systems that predominantly serve these patient groups. ⋯ Health systems that provide care to underserved and marginalized communities face unique challenges implementing the Serious Illness Care Program. They also possess assets, some unique to these settings, that support program adoption. Findings suggest that implementation of similar programs in low-resource healthcare settings may help address unmet needs among marginalized populations.
-
Palliative care is recommended for all people with dementia from diagnosis through end-of-life. However, palliative care needs and effective elements of palliative care are not well-defined for the earlier stages of dementia. ⋯ The literature on palliative care in early dementia is sparse. Future studies should focus on assessment tools for optimizing timing of palliative care in early dementia, gaining better understanding of patient and family needs during early phases of disease, and providing training for providers and families in long-term relationships and communication around goals of care and future planning.
-
J Pain Symptom Manage · Sep 2024
Randomized Controlled TrialPatient Experiences of Specialty Palliative Care in the Perioperative Period for Cancer Surgery.
Though patients undergoing treatment for upper gastrointestinal (GI) cancers frequently experience a range of sequelae and disease recurrence, patients often do not receive specialty palliative care soon after diagnosis and it is unknown in what ways they may benefit. ⋯ While receipt of specialty palliative care in the perioperative period was generally perceived positively and patients appreciated palliative care visits, they did not describe many needs typically met by palliative care practitioners.