Articles: palliative-care.
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J Intensive Care Med · Oct 2020
Are Health-Care Providers Well Prepared in Providing Optimal End-of-Life Care to Critically Ill Patients? A Cross-Sectional Study at a Tertiary Care Hospital in the United States.
It is important for health-care providers to be comfortable in providing end-of-life (EOL) care to critically ill patients and realizing when continuing aggressive measures would be futile. Therefore, there is a need to understand health-care providers' self-perceived skills and barriers to providing optimum EOL care. A total of 660 health-care providers from medicine and surgery departments were asked via e-mail to complete an anonymous survey assessing their self-reported EOL care competencies, of which 238 responses were received. ⋯ More than half of the participants denied having received any previous training in EOL care. 82% of the participants agreed that training should be mandatory in this field. Most of the participants reported that the palliative care team is involved in EOL care when the patient is believed to be terminally ill. Apart from a need for a stronger training in the field of EOL care for health-care providers, the overall policies surrounding EOL and palliative care delivery require further evaluation and improvement to promote better outcomes in caring patients at the EOL.
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In this qualitative study, nurses from the United States of America (USA) and Switzerland were asked to recount their spiritual care experiences with cancer patients and their own responses to their patients' spiritual needs. Recent advances in cancer care have highlighted the importance of spirituality and spiritual care as part of quality palliative care from the time of a patient's diagnosis through end of life. Nurses who play an important role in supporting patients, describe their own discomfort when confronting their patients' spiritual needs. ⋯ Patients' spirituality was identified by nurses who tried to address patients' spiritual needs drawing on existing resources. For nurses, supporting patients in their spirituality and finding meaning in the disease situation eventually led to disease acceptance.
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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.
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Pain is a common symptom for patients with advanced illness. Palliative care (PC) clinicians are experts in pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic treatment of pain and other symptoms for these patients. ⋯ This article, written by clinicians with expertise in interventional pain and PC, outlines and explains many of the adjunctive and interventional therapies that can be considered for patients with pain in the setting of serious illness. Only by understanding and considering all available options can we ensure that our patients are receiving optimal care.