78 Results Found

A substantial number of patients with life-threatening illnesses like cancer receive inappropriate end-of-life care. Improving their quality of end-of-life care is a priority for patients and their families and for public health. To investigate the a...

This paper is written from the perspective of a specialist religious and spiritual care practitioner who practises in major referral hospitals in Sydney, Australia. In these hospitals, religious care and ward-based spiritual care chaplaincy services...

Palliative care has traditionally focused on end-of-life care for patients with advanced cancer. This has since expanded to include symptom management and quality-of-life improvement from the moment of cancer diagnosis. Specialist palliative care tea...

Symptom relief is fundamental to palliative care. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous) Australians are known to experience inequities in health care delivery and outcomes, but large-scale studies of end-of-life symptoms in this populati...

Background: In a patient-centred model of care, referral to early palliative care (EPC) depends on both the prognosis and the complexity of care needs. The PALCOM scale is a 5-domain multidimensional assessment tool developed to identify the level of...

The aim of this research study was to gain an understanding of nurses’ experiences of providing care to patients from minority ethnic groups within the specialist palliative care inpatient unit of an Irish hospice. Five nurses working in a hospice in...

Advanced pancreatic cancer is associated with a poor prognosis, often less than 1 year. Honest prognosis discussions guide early community palliative care services input, facilitating timely advance care planning and improving quality of life. The ai...

COVID-19 patients who may require invasive therapeutic procedures such as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) have high symptom burden and in-hospital mortality. In addition, awake patients on ECMO are new in the intensive care unit (ICU) sett...

Introduction: Identifying the complexity of palliative care needs is a key aspect of referral to specialized multidisciplinary early palliative care (EPC) teams. The PALCOM scale is an instrument consisting of five multidimensional assessment domains...

During humanitarian crises, such as a pandemic, healthcare systems worldwide face unknown challenges. This study aimed to explore and describe the effect of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic on the needs of non-infected patients and family caregivers in specia...

Background: Glioblastoma is an incurable form of brain cancer with a median overall survival of 1.5 years. Despite its progressive nature and high symptom burden, palliative care is not consistently integrated in routine glioblastoma care. Early inte...

Background: Aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the provision of palliative care for patients with palliative care needs emerges as a necessity more than ever. Most are managed in primary care by their family physicians (FP). This study aimed to und...

Palliative care is indicated in patients with heart failure since the early phases of the disease, as suggested by international guidelines. However, patients are referred to palliative care very late. Many barriers could explain the gap between the...

This work provides an opinion on palliative care for people with heart disease. The work focuses on the management of key symptoms associated with both end stage heart disease, applying a palliative approach and suggesting treatment options. The work...

Background: Consumer experience of palliative care has been inconsistently and selectively investigated. Methods: People in Western Australia who had experienced a life limiting illness in the past five years were recruited via social media and care...

Palliative radiotherapy (PRT) is known to be effective in relieving cancer related symptoms. However, many studies and clinical practice show several barriers hindering its use and worsening the quality of patient support during PRT. Various solution...

Potentially avoidable medication-related harm is an inherent risk in palliative care; medication management accounts for approximately 20% of reported serious incidents in England and Wales. Despite their expertise benefiting patient care, the routin...

As the understanding of the role of palliative care in neurology increases, there is the need to ensure that these developments include not only care at home and in hospitals but also in clinics. There are no reports on palliative care from neurology...

Timely palliative care is a systematic process to identify patients with high supportive care needs and to refer these individuals to specialist palliative care in a timely manner based on standardized referral criteria. It requires four components:...

High-grade glioma (HGG) is characterized by debilitating neurologic symptoms and poor prognosis. Some of the suffering this disease engenders may be ameliorated through palliative care, which improves quality of life for seriously ill patients by opt...

The author is not a cardiologist, but an oncologist and palliative care specialist. She is herself an adult with a congenital heart disease (ACHD). From her unique perspective, she comments on the research on psychosocial issues in congenital heart d...

Background: Patients with dementia (PwD) nearing end of life (nEOL) do not always receive optimal end-of-life care, including timely specialist palliative care input. In hospitalized PwD likely to be nEOL, we aimed to determine the prevalence of goal...

Palliative care including hospice care is appropriate for advanced dementia, but policy initiatives and implementation have lagged, while treatment may vary. We compare care for people with advanced dementia in the United States (US), The Netherlands...

Background: Our knowledge about the attitudes of healthcare staff to palliative care in pediatric oncology is scarce. We aimed to assess their perceptions of palliative care in Hungary and find answers to the question of how to provide good palliativ...

Palliative care offers symptom relief and improved quality of life. Tertiary palliative care units (TPCUs) focus on complex suffering under the care of specialist palliative physicians and interdisciplinary teams. The Intensive Palliative Care Unit (...

Background and Objectives: Palliative care is a very important part of medicine, aimed at ensuring an improvement in quality of life and a reduction in distressing symptoms in patients with serious, incurable, progressive diseases. The issues of the...

General practitioners (GPs) are increasingly expected to provide palliative care as ageing populations put pressure on specialist services. Some GPs, however, cite barriers to providing this care including prognostication challenges and lack of confi...

Palliative care is defined as ‘an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families who are facing problems associated with life-threatening illness. It prevents and relieves suffering through identification, assessment...

Early integrated palliative care (EIPC) for patients with advanced cancers requires the involvement of family doctors (FDs) and oncologists. We compared attitudes between patients and their providers regarding the delivery of EIPC. Patients with newl...

Background: Heart failure (HF) is a global problem responsible for significant morbidity and mortality. Methods: This review describes the patient pathways and missed opportunities related to treatment for patients with HF. Results: The contemporary...

From its inception palliative care has been understood as addressing four dimensions: physical, social, emotional/psychological, and spiritual/religious. However, the spiritual and/or religious element is poorly understood and under-researched, and l...

There is a great need for paediatric palliative care (PPC) services globally, but access to services is lacking in many parts of the world, particularly in resource-poor settings. Globally it is estimated that 21.6 million children need access to pal...

Background and Objectives: Anesthesiologists come into contact with patients under palliative care in different clinical settings. They also routinely encounter these patients in their primary field of work, the operating room. Patients receiving pal...

Background/Objectives: Identifying patients with palliative care needs can be challenging in clinical practice. This study reports on the tailoring and evaluation of a minimally invasive intervention (MINI) to support early planning of palliative car...

Background: No population-based data on awareness and knowledge of palliative care currently exist in Austria. We therefore conducted a survey to determine the general awareness and knowledge of palliative care in Styria, a federal state in Austria....

Background: Stroke-related deaths often follow rapid deterioration, making end-of-life (EOL) care decisions particularly challenging in acute settings. Although national guidelines support structured approaches to end-of-life care, there is limited e...

The prompt introduction of supportive care for patients with cancer leads to a better quality of life, potential survival benefits, and improvements in treatment safety. Considering that patients’ needs vary, descriptive assessments could serve...

Chronic kidney disease is marked by a reduced life expectancy and a high symptom burden. For those who reach end-stage renal disease, the prognosis is poor, and this combined with the growing prevalence of the disease necessitates supportive and pall...

Background: Palliative care (pc) consultation has been associated with less aggressive care at end of life in a number of malignancies, but the effect of the consultation timing has not yet been fully characterized. For patients with unresectable pan...

Increasing numbers of people living with chronic and life-limiting diseases are actualising a greater need for palliative care. Physicians are an important provider for identifying the need for palliation, and effective follow-up requires physician c...

Background/Objectives: Hypodermoclysis has gained increasing recognition as a safe, effective, and minimally invasive method for administering medication and fluids in palliative care. Despite its advantages, its adoption remains limited, primarily d...

Early palliative care improves quality of life for patients with life-limiting illnesses, but access is often inequitable. The goal of this study was to assess disparities in early specialist palliative care (SPC) consultation among newly diagnosed s...

Palliative care (pc) is part of the recommended standard of care for patients with advanced cancer. Nevertheless, delivery of pc is inconsistent. Patients who could benefit from pc services are often referred late—or not at all. In planning for impro...

Background/Objectives: Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) in late preterm and term neonates accounts for neonatal mortality and unfavorable neurodevelopmental outcomes in survivors despite therapeutic hypothermia (TH) for neuroprotection. The circ...

The diagnosis of chronic neuropathic pain requires a laborious process and can be a very long journey for the patients, one that can be characterized as an “odyssey.” Our aim was to describe the “diagnostic odyssey” associated...

Background/Objectives: Patients with haematological malignancies less frequently receive specialist palliative care, although they may have unmet needs for symptom control and alleviating psychosocial and existential burdens. The ‘Surprise&rsqu...

Background and Objectives: The incidence and prevalence of cancers are increasing worldwide, with special emphasis placed on prevention, early detection, and the development of new therapeutic strategies that strongly impact patient outcomes. Limited...

Despite the known benefits, healthcare systems struggle to provide early, integrated palliative care (PC) for advanced cancer patients. Understanding the barriers to providing PC from the perspective of oncology clinicians is an important first step...

Background: The present study assessed whether early palliative care (EPC) targeting pain and depression and automated symptom monitoring could improve symptoms in patients with advanced pancreatobiliary cancer. Methods: Patients diagnosed with patho...

Lung cancer continues to be the largest cause of cancer-related mortality among men and women globally, accounting for around 27% of all cancer-related deaths. Recent advances in lung cancer medicines, particularly for non-small-cell lung cancer (NSC...