Palliative medicine
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Palliative medicine · Feb 2025
ReviewTraining programs in communication skills for healthcare professionals caring for children with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions and their families: A systematic review of healthcare professionals' behavioral impact and children's health outcomes.
Effective communication has potential benefits for children, their families, and healthcare professionals. Although communication skills training programs are essential for healthcare professionals, their effects remain unclear. ⋯ Communication skills training for healthcare professionals may improve their behaviors toward children with life-threatening conditions and their families. Measurement tools and timings must be standardized. Future research should develop training programs and assess their impact on children and their families, incorporating the perspective of children.
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Palliative medicine · Feb 2025
ReviewMeasuring the quality of patient-provider relationships in serious illness: A scoping review.
People affected by serious illness face several threats to their well-being: physical symptoms, psychological distress, disrupted social relations, and spiritual/existential crises. Relationships with clinicians provide a form of structured support that promotes shared decision-making and adaptive stress coping. Measuring relationship quality may improve quality assessment and patient care outcomes. However, researchers and those promoting quality improvement lack clear guidance on measuring this. ⋯ Measures include items that assess patient-provider relationship quality in serious illness settings. Researchers may consider these for evaluating and improving relationship quality, a patient-centered care and research outcome.
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Experience sampling methods typically involve multiple self-report assessments per day over consecutive days. Unlike traditional patient-reported outcome measures or interviews, such methods offer the possibility to capture the temporal fluctuations of experiences in daily environments, making them valuable for studying the daily lives of people with advanced illness. Yet, their use in palliative care research is limited. ⋯ Experience sampling methods hold potential to uncover the dynamics of everyday experiences of people with advanced illness. The methods offer considerable flexibility and options to answer a variety of research questions, but consideration is required regarding sampling protocols and participant burden. We showed appropriate feasibility and acceptable participant burden of the methods among people with advanced breast or advanced lung cancer.
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Palliative medicine · Feb 2025
Community out-of-hours palliative care - 'It's a patchwork of services': A qualitative study exploring care provision.
People in receipt of community palliative care usually receive care from a range of services and require access to care 24/7. However, care outside of normal working hours varies, with little understanding of which models of care are optimal. ⋯ This study identifies key characteristics of four common models of out-of-hours palliative care, from the perspectives of professionals. Facilitators of high quality out-of-hours care include: a palliative care specific single point of access for patients; formal structures to integrate generalist/specialist services; and timely/skilled management of symptoms. We provide recommendations for a potential model incorporating these factors.
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Palliative medicine · Feb 2025
Exploring "good days" with advanced cancer: A pilot daily diary study.
People with Stage IV cancer face physical and emotional challenges impacting quality of life. Conventional quality of life measures do not capture daily fluctuations in patient well-being. ⋯ This study highlights the importance of understanding day-to-day quality of life in individuals with advanced cancer. Further research is needed to assess quality of life longitudinally and to develop personalized supportive and palliative care interventions in this population.