International journal of palliative nursing
-
It is easy to be sceptical about tables that rank services but there is also something quite intriguing about rankings-with an inevitable curiosity about who made it to the top of the table. It is with this in mind that I read a report entitled The Quality of Death: Ranking End-of-Life Care Across the World (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2010).
-
This article reports a study to examine the meaning of hope from the perspective of Chinese advanced cancer patients in Hong Kong. ⋯ While hope is related to the wellbeing of patients with advanced cancer, successful palliative care partly depends on an awareness of the importance of hope in the end-of-life context and cultural sensitivity to the meanings behind it from the patients' own perspective.
-
Interprofessional collaboration occurs when health professionals from different disciplines work together to identify needs, solve problems, make joint decisions on how best to proceed, and evaluate outcomes collectively. Interprofessional collaboration supports patient-centred care and takes place through teamwork. Team interactions, wider organizational issues, and environmental structures, such as safety, quality, efficiency and effectiveness issues influence this model of care. ⋯ This article will discuss factors that affect interprofessional collaboration in relation to patients and families in palliative care. First, a definition of interprofessional collaboration is given, followed by an outline of the need for interprofessional collaboration. A brief discussion of key issues that influence collaboration follows, and a review of the implications for practice is presented.