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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Palliative medicine · Feb 2025
ReviewWorking with people living with motor neurone disease and the impact on professionals' emotional and psychological well-being: A scoping review.
Integrated multidisciplinary care is required to manage the progressive and debilitating symptoms associated with motor neurone disease. Professionals can find providing the level of care required by this population clinically and emotionally challenging. To support those working with these patients it is important to understand the experience of the entire multidisciplinary team involved and the impact of working with motor neurone disease on their emotional and psychological well-being. ⋯ Positive experiences included job satisfaction, enhanced perspective and receiving gratitude, while negative implications such as stress, emotional exhaustion and burnout also featured. The demands of motor neurone disease patient care, the organisation of services and resources required to meet patient and family needs and the emotional burden for professionals involved, warrant greater recognition in clinical practice, guidelines and future research.
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Palliative medicine · Feb 2025
ReviewA scoping review of global patterns in reporting race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion in palliative care randomized controlled trials: Recommendations for transparency.
Though randomized controlled trials of non-pharmacological palliative care interventions have shown positive outcomes, findings are often generalized with limited consideration for the impact of the influence of race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion on said outcomes. ⋯ Improving greater transparency in study reporting of social and historical context about population demographics, including specific demographic data collected, may better identify unmet palliative needs, facilitate cross-cultural interpretation, and improve adaptation and implementation of non-pharmacological palliative care interventions.