Articles: palliative-care.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2020
ReviewTriggered Palliative Care Consults: A Systematic Review of Interventions for Hospitalized and Emergency Department Patients.
Palliative care improves the quality of care and may reduce utilization, but delays or the absences of such services are common and costly in inpatient and emergency department settings. Triggered palliative care consults (PCCs) offer one way to identify patients who would benefit from palliative care and to connect them with services early in their course. Consensus reports recommend use of triggers to identify patients for PCC, but no standards exist to guide trigger design or implementation. ⋯ We present a range of trigger tools spanning different hospital settings and patient populations. Common themes in implementation and content arose, but the limitations of these studies are notable, and further rigorous randomized comparisons are needed to generate standards of care. In addition, future studies should focus on developing triggers that identify patients requiring primary-level vs. specialty-level palliative care.
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The corona pandemic has led to a number of restrictions and prohibitions, which in turn place large psychosocial or spiritual burdens on patients with COVID-19, their families and relatives and the treating personnel in the healthcare system. Patients with COVID-19 are not allowed to receive visitors and many hospitals and nursing homes have completely banned visitors. Many support services have been reduced or stopped completely. ⋯ Families should also be enabled to say goodbye to the deceased with adequate protective equipment or should be offered alternative real or virtual options for remembrance and commemoration. Health care professionals coping with the exceptional stress should be continuously supported. This requires clear communication and leadership structures, communication training, psychosocial support, but most of all optimal framework conditions for the clinical work.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2020
A PILOT STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF COMPLETE: A COMMUNICATION PLAN EARLY THROUGH END OF LIFE, ON END OF LIFE OUTCOMES IN CHILDREN WITH CANCER.
Most children with cancer die in hospital settings, without hospice, and many suffer from high-intensity medical interventions and pain at end of life (EOL). ⋯ COMPLETE resulted in increased hospice enrollment in children with cancer at EOL compared with historical controls. In preanalysis/postanalysis, COMPLETE decreased child pain while supporting hope and reducing uncertainty in their parents.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2020
Development of a Palliative Care Toolkit for the COVID-19 Pandemic.
The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to high numbers of critically ill and dying patients in need of expert management of dyspnea, delirium, and serious illness communication. The rapid spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome-Coronavirus-2 creates surges of infected patients requiring hospitalization and puts palliative care programs at risk of being overwhelmed by patients, families, and clinicians seeking help. In response to this unprecedented need for palliative care, our program sought to create a collection of palliative care resources for nonpalliative care clinicians. ⋯ The suite of resources provides expert and evidence-based guidance on symptom management including dyspnea, pain, and delirium, as well as on serious illness communication, including conversations about goals of care, code status, and end of life. We also created a nurse resource hotline staffed by palliative care nurse practitioners and virtual office hours staffed by a palliative care attending physician. Since its development, the Toolkit has helped us disseminate best practices to nonpalliative care clinicians delivering primary palliative care, allowing our team to focus on the highest-need consults and increasing acceptance of palliative care across hospital settings.