Palliative Care Commons^™

Mortality In Medicine, Maren Dougherty

Honors Projects

Practitioners in the medical field attend to health issues across one’s lifespan from birth to death and everything in between. A common conflict in today’s practice of medicine is establishing the true function of medicine. The complete reliance on medicine to ward off death proliferates the biomedicalization of natural life processes, like death. Biomedicalization is the process in which medical authority and its accompanying technology begin to control other aspects of daily life. With medicine’s ultimate goal being to cure disease and fight death, it interferes with the inevitability of human mortality. End-of-life treatment can be taken too far without …

Early Integration Of Palliative Care With Curative Oncology Treatment For Patients With Advanced Cancer: Implications For Clinical Nursing Practice, Rhea Rughani

Honors Projects

Palliative care, though clinically established to improve health-related quality of life measures for patients with advanced illness, remains underutilized and largely limited to end of life care. This project aims to inform oncology nursing practice through the analysis of literature supporting the early integration of palliative care with standard curative oncology treatment for patients with clinically advanced cancer. Informed by relevant research, clinical practice guidelines, and improved specialty palliative care training, oncology nurses and nurse practitioners are ideally situated to advocate for and initiate early palliative care integration, to holistically improve the standard approach to complex cancer care.

A Qualitative Analysis Of End-Of-Life Healthcare In Tennessee: Politics, Principles, And Perceptions, Erin Mauck

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The unprecedented growth of the aging population in Tennessee is a significant demographic trend that highlights the necessity for healthcare policy that tackles end-of-life issues. This study examined the perceived quality of end-of-life healthcare in Tennessee, areas that are in need of improvement, policies that have the potential to influence improvements, and the role of politics in end-of-life healthcare policy. It also assessed the support for end-of-life healthcare policy that would advance quality of care and expand end-of-life choices for Tennesseans, while evaluating the policy-making process that legislators employ.

For this study, data were collected using semi-structured, in-depth interviews with …

The Hapless State Of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis In India: A Comprehensive Look At Life And Medical Services For Als Patients In Rural Himachal Pradesh, Carson J. Bergström

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that leads to paralysis. The disease requires a high amount of medical intervention and interdisciplinary focus to achieve quality of life for patients. This study looks at ALS patient’s lifestyles, their access to these medical devices, Indian therapeutic approaches and policy that impacts patients in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. As caretakers have a critical part in the care for this disease, their lives were also considered in the case studies. It was found that ALS patients are not experiencing access to medical devices necessary for life because of physical …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Care Choices A Home-Based Palliative Care Program, Katherine Pouliot

Honors Theses

Background: There is a growing need for home-based palliative care services, especially for seriously ill individuals who want to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations and remain with their regular outside care providers. Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of Care Choices, a new in-home palliative care program provided by the Visiting Nurse Services of Northeastern New York and Ellis Medicine, a community healthcare system serving New York’s Capital District. Design: A prospective cohort study tracking patient outcomes over the course of one year. Subjects and setting: One hundred twenty-three patients (49 men, 74 women) with serious illnesses who were new enrollees in Care …

Evaluation Of An In-Home Palliative Care Program's Management Of Pain, Mackenzie Laporte

Honors Theses

With the growing population of chronically ill patients wishing to receive care at home, care providers face unique challenges managing the pain of patients with quickly changing illness trajectories. Treating patients outside of institutionalized settings, where regular monitoring is standard, requires careful symptom management. This project was a retrospective review examining nurses’ documentation of pain for patients enrolled in Care Choices, a new home-based palliative care program coordinated through a visiting nurse service and community hospital. The extent to which nurses documented patients' pain score, site, type and pain goal as well as nursing interventions and plan of care in …

Patient-Reported Outcomes Screening For Improved Patient Wellness: A Cancer Center Initiative, Alison Morris

Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Projects

Background: People experiencing serious illness have significant unmet physical, emotional, social and spiritual needs. The Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI) requires patients to be screened for emotional wellbeing and pain by their second oncology visit. This project details one cancer center’s quality improvement initiative to (a) implement electronic screening of every cancer patient by their second oncology visit, (b) design processes for ongoing assessment and intervention of need(s), and (c) develop measurable and sustainable evaluation metrics to ensure that palliative care needs are met. Methods: In June 2015, we launched electronic collection of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) using the Patient Reported …

Las Percepciones De Los Profesionales De La Salud Sobre Los Cuidados Paliativos En Diferentes Sectores De Salud En La Ciudad De Buenos Aires / Perceptions Of Health Professionals About Palliative Care In Different Health Sectors In The City Of Buenos Aires, Kate Paulsen

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Información contextual: Los cuidados paliativos son un campo de medicina para pacientes con enfermedades avanzadas o terminales. El propósito de la medicina paliativa es mejorar la calidad de vida de los pacientes y su familia y cuidar los síntomas físicos, psicológicos, sociales y espirituales. Los equipos interdisciplinarios compuestos de médicos, enfermeros, trabajadores sociales, psicólogos y otros tienen un papel esencial en el cuidado del paciente en una manera completa. Los cuidados paliativos son importantes porque todos tienen el derecho a ser acompañados en el final de la vida. En Argentina, los cuidados paliativos se han desarrollado considerablemente y existen en …

Uncovering Meanings Of Death, Trauma, And Loss As Experienced By Hospice Bereavement Coordinators: A Phenomenological Study, Rochelle S. Clarke

Department of Family Therapy Dissertations and Applied Clinical Projects

This study examined the experiences of Hospice Bereavement Coordinators (HBCs) and Hospice Chaplains working with grief narratives from patient-family units exhibiting signs of anticipatory or complicated grief. While a significant amount of research has been conducted on Hospice employees, no qualitative studies have examined the interpretation of meaning from employees whose primary role focused on the psychosocial-spiritual aspects of clients exhibiting anticipatory or complicated grief. The researcher identified shared meaning of death, trauma, and loss from six participants in the context of a high stress and high loss environment. This study‘s findings revealed ten central themes: Death is an earthly …

An Ehealth System Supporting Palliative Care For Patients With Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer: A Randomized Trial, David H. Gustafson, Lori L. Dubenske, Kang Namkoong, Robert Hawkins, Ming-Yuan Chih, Amy K. Atwood, Roberta Johnson, Abhik Bhattacharya, Cindy L. Carmack, Anne M. Traynor, Toby C. Campbell, Mary K. Buss, Ramaswamy Govindan, Joan H. Schiller, James F. Cleary

Community & Leadership Development Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: In this study, the authors examined the effectiveness of an online support system (Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System [CHESS]) versus the Internet in relieving physical symptom distress in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

METHODS: In total, 285 informal caregiver-patient dyads were assigned randomly to receive, for up to 25 months, standard care plus training on and access to either use of the Internet and a list of Internet sites about lung cancer (the Internet arm) or CHESS (the CHESS arm). Caregivers agreed to use CHESS or the Internet and to complete bimonthly surveys; for patients, these tasks …

A Review Of The Literature On Bilingual Education, Lorna Rivera

Lorna Rivera

Changes in bilingual education will have an important impact on the future well-being of the growing Latino community in Massachusetts. This report summarizes some of the major research findings regarding the purposes and effectiveness of bilingual education. Questions that will be addressed include: What are the existing bilingual education models? Which bilingual education models work best? Should there be time limits for bilingual education? Do immigrants resist learning English? Does speaking another language interfere with learning? Should bilingual students be exempt from state-mandated testing? Are bilingual teachers qualified? Are bilingual education students more likely to dropout? It is hoped that …

Book Review, Mitchell M. Simon

RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002)

Review of: MARSHALL A. KAPP, ETHICAL ASPECTS OF HEALTH CARE FOR THE ELDERLY: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY. (Greenwood Press 1992). [200 pp.] Number 17 in series, Bibliographies and Indices in Gerontology. Author index; foreword by Erdman B. Palmore, series editor; preface; subject index. LC: 92-17776; ISBN: 0-313-27490-8. [Cloth $45.00. P.O. Box 5007, Westport CT 06881.]

Ua12/2/1 College Heights Herald, Vol. 58, No. 29 Magazine, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Archives Records

Special magazine issue of the College Heights Herald. This issue contains articles:

• Mitchell, Cyndi. Being With Hospice of Bowling Green
• Wright, Sharon. The Two Week Semester - Will It Ever End?
• Smith, Erica. A Social Awareness - Dean Nason