Palliative medicine
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Palliative medicine · Sep 2019
Robotic technology for palliative and supportive care: Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Medical robots are increasingly used for a variety of applications in healthcare. Robots have mainly been used to support surgical procedures, and for a variety of assistive uses in dementia and elderly care. To date, there has been limited debate about the potential opportunities and risks of robotics in other areas of palliative, supportive and end-of-life care. ⋯ Robotics could have a number of potential applications in palliative, supportive and end-of-life care. Future work should evaluate the health-related, economic, societal and ethical implications of using this technology. There is a need for collaborative research to establish use-cases and inform policy, to ensure the appropriate use (or non-use) of robots for people with serious illness.
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Palliative medicine · Sep 2019
Do published patient decision aids for end-of-life care address patients' decision-making needs? A systematic review and critical appraisal.
Many decisions are made by patients in their last months of life, creating complex decision-making needs for these individuals. Identifying whether currently existing patient decision aids address the full range of these patient decision-making needs will better inform end-of-life decision support in clinical practice. ⋯ Patient decision-making needs are broad and varied. Currently developed patient decision aids are insufficiently addressing patient decision-making needs. Improving future end-of-life patient decision aid content through five key suggestions could improve patient-focused decision-making support at the end of life.
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Palliative medicine · Sep 2019
Multi-disciplinary palliative care is effective in people with symptomatic heart failure: A systematic review and narrative synthesis.
Despite recommendations, people with heart failure have poor access to palliative care. ⋯ Overall, the results support the use of multi-disciplinary palliative care in people with advanced heart failure but trials do not identify who would benefit most from specialist palliative referral. There are no sufficiently robust multi-centre evaluation phase trials to provide generalisable findings. Use of common population, intervention and outcomes in future research would allow meta-analysis.
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Palliative medicine · Sep 2019
Observational StudyAccurate prognostic awareness and preference states influence the concordance between terminally ill cancer patients' states of preferred and received life-sustaining treatments in the last 6 months of life.
Factors facilitating/hindering concordance between preferred and received life-sustaining treatments may be distorted if preferences and predictors are measured long before death. ⋯ Prognostic awareness and preferred states of life-sustaining treatments were significantly associated with concordance between preferred and received life-sustaining-treatment states. Personalized interventions should be developed to cultivate terminally ill cancer patients' accurate prognostic awareness, allowing them to formulate realistic life-sustaining-treatment preferences and facilitating their receiving value-concordant end-of-life care.
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Palliative medicine · Sep 2019
Consumer and carer leadership in palliative care academia and practice: A systematic review with narrative synthesis.
Contemporary health policies call for consumers to be part of all aspects of service planning, implementation, delivery and evaluation. The extent to which consumers are part of the systemic decision-making levels of palliative care appears to vary between and within services and organisations. ⋯ The findings suggest that more could be done to support consumer leadership within palliative care. Academics and clinicians might improve the relevance of their work if they are able to more meaningfully partner with consumers in systemic roles in palliative care.