Palliative medicine
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Palliative medicine · Feb 2020
Community knowledge of and attitudes to palliative care: A descriptive study.
Palliative care is predominantly accessed late in the course of an illness, despite evidence to suggest the benefits of early engagement. Strategies are required to reduce the barriers to the delivery of palliative care. ⋯ Gaps in knowledge about palliative care exist in community, which may limit citizen's potential access to quality care in the event of serious illness. These results point to a role for public education programmes, which may, in turn, also shift attitudes to palliative care.
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Palliative care aims to improve quality of life by relieving physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering. Health system planning can be informed by evaluating cost and effectiveness of health care delivery, including palliative care. ⋯ Applicability and generalizability of evidence is uncertain due to small sample sizes, short duration, and limited modeling of costs and effects. Further economic evaluations with larger sample sizes are needed, inclusive of the diversity and complexity of palliative care populations and using patient-centered outcomes.
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Palliative medicine · Jan 2020
Comparative StudyEffect of caregiving at end of life on grief, quality of life and general health: A prospective, longitudinal, comparative study.
Determining the effect of caregiving and bereavement remains a challenge. To date, no study has employed a comparison group to investigate caregivers' grief, quality of life and general health in relation to non-caregivers. ⋯ It took 9-10 months for the caregivers' grief, general health and quality of life to correspond to the comparison group. These findings present an opportunity for palliative care research and practice to consider how best to support the majority of caregivers without grief complications so that their pre- and post-death support needs are realised.
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Palliative medicine · Jan 2020
Randomized Controlled TrialOnline training improves medical students' ability to recognise when a person is dying: The ORaClES randomised controlled trial.
Recognising dying is a key clinical skill for doctors, yet there is little training. ⋯ The online training resource proved effective in altering the decision-making of medical students to agree more with expert decision-making.