Palliative medicine
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Palliative medicine · Feb 2015
How hospice staff members prepare family caregivers for the patient's final days of life: an exploratory study.
There is widespread agreement that the families of hospice patients need to be prepared for the final days of life, yet current practices preparing families are not well described. Examining the gap between family needs and current practice will inform the development of effective preparatory interventions. ⋯ Most content previous identified as necessary for preparedness is part of the current preparation. The knowledge of the current practice in preparing families can be used to develop systematic means of assessing the factors related to timing and tailoring, which may assist in developing preparatory messages that are effective and timely.
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Palliative medicine · Jan 2015
Multicenter StudyPalliative Care Phase: inter-rater reliability and acceptability in a national study.
The concept of palliative care consisting of five distinct, clinically meaningful, phases (stable, unstable, deteriorating, terminal and bereavement) was developed in Australia about 20 years ago and is used routinely for communicating clinical status, care planning, quality improvement and funding. ⋯ Policy makers, funders and clinicians can be confident that Palliative Care Phase is a reliable and acceptable measure that can be used for care planning, quality improvement and funding purposes.
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Palliative medicine · Jan 2015
ReviewEffectiveness of complex interventions focused on quality-of-life assessment to improve palliative care patients' outcomes: a systematic review.
One of the most crucial palliative care challenges is in determining how patient' needs are defined and assessed. Assessing quality of life has been defined as a priority in palliative care, and it has become a central concept in palliative care practice. ⋯ Effectiveness of interventions focused on quality-of-life assessment is moderate. Additional studies should explore the complexity of the real palliative care world more accurately and understand the effects of independent variables included in complex palliative care interventions.