International journal of palliative nursing
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Although anticipatory grief is a much-debated and critiqued bereavement concept, it does offer a way of understanding and exploring expected loss that may be helpful in certain situations. In end-of-life care in adult intensive care units, families often act as proxy decision makers for patients in the transition from curative treatment efforts to planned treatment withdrawal. ⋯ Focusing on end-of-life intensive care practices, this paper integrates work on anticipatory grief and family interventions to present a family-centred framework of care. Through this it is argued that the complex needs of families must be more comprehensively understood by doctors and nurses and that interventions must be more systematically planned to improve quality end-of-life care for families in this setting.
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The changes within children's palliative care services in the UK over the last decade highlight the importance of respite provision. This article reports on an evaluation of a children's hospice in northern England that was undertaken to elicit the views of 24 service users on their experiences of respite care in the hospice: parents, children and young people, siblings, guardians and family carers. ⋯ The findings demonstrate the tensions that parents in need of respite care feel as a result of the power unconsciously exercised by staff. Redistribution of resources and reordering of priorities are recommended to prevent the inadvertent impact upon families.
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The purpose of this research was to characterize the nursing actions practiced by Romanian nurses affiliated with Hospices of Hope that promote dignified dying and explore needs to promote a more dignified death. ⋯ Dignity for terminally ill Romanian will be enhanced as the nurses implement these interventions. Awareness of cultural and spiritual differences concerning end of life will facilitate dialogue among nurse scientists.
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The purpose of this study was to explore recording rates of preferences, and the preferred and actual place of death among hospice patients. Data was collected retrospectively from a group of three hospices over a 6-month period. Of 298 patients, 174 patients (58.4%) had no expressed preference for place of death. ⋯ The overall congruence was 61.7% and kappa value was 0.38 (0.23-0.52, 95% confidence interval). The low rate of expressed preferences suggests that congruence of preferred and actual place of death was a suitable outcome measurement for less than half of hospice patients. A wider range of patient-focused indicators for identifying the quality of end-of life services is needed as preferred place of death may not be the only suitable indicator for all patients.