The American journal of hospice & palliative care
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Am J Hosp Palliat Care · Oct 2020
Discussing Goals of Care in a Pandemic: Precedent for an Unprecedented Situation.
The COVID-19 pandemic has precipitated the need for frequent end-of-life discussions. The circumstances surrounding these conversations are quite atypical. Here, I describe one such goals-of-care discussion during the pandemic and how I relied on the precedent of prior goals-of-care discussions to guide me through an unprecedented situation.
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Am J Hosp Palliat Care · Oct 2020
The Role of Palliative Care in Caring for the Families of Patients With COVID-19.
In palliative care, we strive to provide care to the whole patient. When we think about the whole patient, we include the people who are important in our patients' lives. Our New York City-based palliative care team has found that caring for patients' loved ones has proven to be an even more important aspect of the care we have provided during the COVID epidemic. In this article, we describe the multicomponenet interdisciplinary interventions we have implemented to enhance our ability to create a therapeutic alliance with family members and facilitate the provision of goal concordant care to patients with COVID during this extremely difficult time.
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Am J Hosp Palliat Care · Oct 2020
Palliative Care Team Involvement in Patients With COVID-19 in New York City.
With the highest number of cases in the world as of April 13, 2020, New York City (NYC) became the epicenter of the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The data regarding palliative team involvement in patients with COVID-19, however, remains scarce. We aimed to investigate outcomes of palliative team involvement for the patients with COVID-19 in NYC. ⋯ Critically ill patients hospitalized for COVID-19 benefit from palliative team consults by helping to clarify advanced directives and minimize futile resuscitative efforts.