Articles: palliative-care.
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PC-FACS (FastArticleCriticalSummaries forClinicians inPalliativeCare) provides hospice and palliative care clinicians with concise summaries of the most important findings from more than 100 medical and scientific journals. If you have colleagues who would benefit from receiving PCFACS, please encourage them to join the AAHPM at aahpm.org. Comments from readers are welcomed at pcfacs@aahpm.org.
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Gen Hosp Psychiatry · Nov 2020
Multicenter Study Observational StudySafety and effectiveness of antipsychotic medication for delirium in patients with advanced cancer: A large-scale multicenter prospective observational study in real-world palliative care settings.
To clarify the safety and effectiveness of antipsychotic medication for delirium in patients with advanced cancer receiving palliative care. ⋯ The use of antipsychotics as part of comprehensive delirium management was safe and may provide some symptomatic benefits for patients with terminal illness and delirium. Along with adequate non-pharmacological interventions, judicious use of antipsychotics is still recommended.
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Keepsakes are a relatively unexplored form of bereavement support that is frequently provided as part of the 3 Wishes Project (3WP). The 3WP is a palliative care intervention in which individualized wishes are implemented in the adult intensive care unit for dying patients and their families. ⋯ Keepsakes are common wishes that clinicians in the intensive care unit are able to provide and sometimes cocreate with families when patients are dying. Both the offering to create the keepsake and receipt of the final product are perceived by family members as helpful.
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Background: Understanding patients' goals and values is important to ensure goal-concordant care; however, such discussions can be challenging. Little is known about the impact of having these discussions on hospitalists. Objective: To assess the impact on hospitalists of a system that reminds them to have serious illness conversations with their patients identified with potential unmet palliative needs. ⋯ The intervention hospitalists, over time, reported a slight reduction in the sense of meaning they achieved from the conversations. Conclusion: Routinely informing hospitalists when their patients were identified as being at increased risk for unmet palliative needs did not increase the sense of meaning these providers achieved. It is likely the pretrial training accounted for many of the positive outcomes in communication skills observed in both arms of the trial.
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Is oncology a spiritual practice? It is important, if not essential, to recognize how patients contextualize their illness. Medical education does not prepare us for the tangential effects of illness, and we therefore miss opportunities to treat the spiritual domains of human suffering. Through experiences from mentors, both within medical oncology and palliative care, I learned what true patient centered medicine entails-lcaring for patients-lbody and soul.