Health communication
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Health communication · Jan 2003
ReviewThe use of humor in promoting positive provider-patient interactions in a hospital rehabilitation unit.
Humor within the health care setting apparently can serve to facilitate positive patient-provider interactions and to create a patient-centered environment. This article provides an ethnographic account of patient-provider interactions held during therapeutic activity sessions within a hospital unit (MIRTH) designed to promote therapeutic humor. ⋯ Whereas MIRTH used contrived humor to portray its identity as a humor unit, staff and patients also took advantage of spontaneous humor that emerged out of interactions. Humor appeared secondary to the primary outcome of promoting patients' happiness and well being.
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Health communication · Jan 2003
The communication of palliative care for the elderly cancer patient.
Palliative care (PC) is often recommended by physicians for their elderly patients who are terminally ill. In contrast to hospice care, which precludes the use of any curative treatment at life's end stages, PC seeks primarily to comfort patients and to keep them pain free, yet it does not necessarily preclude medical treatment. ⋯ Furthermore, few methods in PC research incorporate patients' narratives and lived experiences in the final stages of their lives. We argue that a holistic, patient-centered approach must guide research in PC, including the treatment of elderly patients as "active interpreters, managers, and creators of the meaning of their health and illness" (Vanderford, Jenks, & Sharf, 1997, p.14) and of the meaning of their lives.