Articles: palliative-care.
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Patient and family advisory councils (PFACs) represent one method of engaging patients and families in clinical program development and research, but existing practices too often exclude marginalized and minority voices. As a kidney palliative care team (KidneyPal) at a large academic medical center, we sought to create a PFAC that explicitly considered equity and inclusion in its approach to advisor recruitment. ⋯ We removed application requirements including lengthy online training modules, detailed employment history, a personal essay, and a criminal background check. The KidneyPal PFAC may act as a model for improving equity and inclusion in virtual patient advisory councils.
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Internal medicine journal · Nov 2023
Improving palliative and supportive care in advanced cirrhosis: the HepatoCare model of integrated collaborative care.
Patients with advanced cirrhosis experience an unpredictable disease trajectory but are infrequently referred to palliative care (PC) services and rarely undertake advance care planning (ACP). ⋯ HepatoCare is a novel multidisciplinary model of care that integrates effective PC and specialist hepatology management to improve outcomes in advanced cirrhosis.
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Ampullary or papillary carcinoma is a malignant tumor arising from the mucosa in the region of the major duodenal papilla, also known as the ampulla of Vater. Uniform treatment recommendations are lacking both for the adjuvant situation and for palliative care. ⋯ The current state of the evidence on the treatment of ampullary carcinoma is poor. Therapeutic decisions should be discussed in an interdisciplinary tumor board and should, in our opinion, take the histological subtype into account.
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Shared decision-making is a joint process where patients, or their surrogates, and clinicians make health choices based on evidence and preferences. We aimed to determine the extent and predictors of shared decision-making for goals-of-care discussions for critically ill neurological patients, which is crucial for patient-goal-concordant care but currently unknown. ⋯ Fewer than 1 in 10 goals-of-care clinician-family meetings for critically ill neurological patients contained all shared decision-making elements. Our findings highlight gaps in shared decision-making. Interventions promoting shared decision-making for high-stakes decisions in these patients may increase patient-value congruent care; future studies should also examine whether they will affect decision quality and surrogates' health outcomes.