Palliative medicine
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Palliative medicine · Jul 2013
ReviewAged parents' experiences during a critical illness trajectory and after the death of an adult child: a review of the literature.
Given the growing life expectancy, the likelihood increases that health-care providers are confronted with older people having an adult child with a life-limiting disease. ⋯ There is a need for more in-depth research to understand the lived experience of these parents and what health-care providers can do to assist them.
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Palliative medicine · Jul 2013
Exploring factors and caregiver outcomes associated with feelings of preparedness for caregiving in family caregivers in palliative care: a correlational, cross-sectional study.
Family caregivers in palliative care often report feeling insufficiently prepared to handle the caregiver role. Preparedness has been confirmed as a variable that may actually protect family caregiver well-being. Preparedness refers to how ready family caregivers perceive they are for the tasks and demands in the caregiving role. ⋯ Feelings of preparedness seem to be important for how family caregivers experience the unique situation when caring for a patient who is severely ill and close to death. Our findings support the inclusion of preparedness in support models for family caregivers in palliative care. Psycho-educational interventions could preferably be designed aiming to increase family caregiver's preparedness to care, including practical care, communication and emotional support.
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Palliative medicine · Jul 2013
ReviewTools to measure quality of life and carer burden in informal carers of heart failure patients: a narrative review.
Heart failure is a complex cardiac syndrome prevalent in an older population. Caring for heart failure patients through the disease trajectory presents physical and emotional challenges for informal carers. Carers have to deal with clinically unstable patients, the responsibility of managing and titrating medication according to symptoms and frequent admissions to acute care. These challenges compound the demands on caregivers' physical and psychosocial well-being. Alongside the negative impact of being a carer, positive aspects have also been demonstrated; carers describe feelings of shared responsibility of caring with professional carers and the reward of supporting a loved one, which creates a new role in their relationship. ⋯ This review highlights evidence that informal carers supporting patients with heart failure face many challenges impacting their physical and mental well-being. The studies described provide an insight into the individual dimensions that make a carer particularly vulnerable, namely, younger carers, female carers and carers with existing physical and emotional health issues. Additionally, there are external influences that increase risk of burden, including New York Heart Association Score status of the patient, if the patient has had recurrent emergency admissions or has recently been discharged home and the level of social support available to the carer. A further finding from conducting this review is that there are still limited measures of the positive aspects of caregiving.
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Palliative medicine · Jul 2013
Signs of post-traumatic stress disorder in caregivers following an expected death: a qualitative study.
Complications of grief are an important area of investigation with potential to improve the well-being of palliative care caregivers. There has been little study of the prevalence or significance of post-traumatic stress disorder for those bereaved after an expected death. ⋯ This exploratory study demonstrates the phenomenon of the 'shocked caregiver'. If trauma symptoms are present in bereaved carers in palliative care, it has implications for palliative care provision. Given that trauma symptoms may be distinct from prolonged grief disorder, this may also have implications for provision of bereavement counselling. Further research into this phenomenon is required.
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Palliative medicine · Jul 2013
A multicenter survey of Hispanic caregiver preferences for patient decision control in the United States and Latin America.
Understanding family caregivers' decisional role preferences is important for communication, quality of care, and patient and family satisfaction. The family caregiver has an important role in a patient's decisional role preferences. There are limited studies on family caregivers' preferences of the patient's decision control at the end of life among Hispanics. ⋯ Most Hispanic family caregivers preferred the patient to make shared decisions. Hispanic Latin American caregivers more frequently preferred patients to assume a passive decisional role. Acculturation did not influence the preferences of Hispanic American caregivers.