Palliative Care Commons^™

Music At The End Of Life: Bringing Comfort And Saying Goodbye Through Song And Story, Amy Clements-Cortés

Music Faculty Publications

Music has been an important part of the human existence across all continents and cultures since the beginning of recorded time. It is used, for example, in the celebration of happy events, for religious rituals, and to acknowledge the death of loved ones, often as part of spiritual and symbolic rituals. Although the formal and structured use of music as a component of care for individuals in end-of-life palliative care and hospice systems is relatively new in the world of contemporary medicine, its use is growing rapidly and is appreciated by both those providing the music and those receiving the …

Learner-Based Teaching In Hospice And Palliative Care, Paul D. Longenecker

Health and Sport Sciences Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Palliative Care For The Medically Complex Child, Melanie Anspacher, Neha H. Shah

E-Learning Modules

**From the AAMC website: Contains time-sensitive information that will likely be inaccurate, obsolete, or irrelevant by August 12, 2016**

Children with special health care needs are increasingly prevalent in US hospitals. The pediatric hospitalist is often the primary provider of inpatient care for these patients. The Complex Care Curriculum was developed to provide a multi-modal educational curriculum for providers with the overall goal of improving inpatient care for this population. The curriculum is composed primarily of a series of topic-specific learning modules. This particular resource was created to provide pediatricians with educational materials related to palliative care for the medically …

Education And Referral Criteria: Impact On Oncology Referrals To Palliative Care., Barbara Reville, Joanne Reifsnyder, Deborah B Mcguire, Karen Kaiser, Abbie Santana

Department of Family & Community Medicine Faculty Papers

OBJECTIVE: To describe a quality improvement project involving education and referral criteria to influence oncology provider referrals to a palliative care service.

METHODS: A single group post-test only quasi-experimental design was used to evaluate palliative care service (PCS) referrals following an intervention consisting of a didactic presentation, education outreach visits (EOV) to key providers, and referral criteria. Data on patient demographics, cancer types, consult volume, reasons for referral, pre-consult length of stay, overall hospital stay, and discharge disposition were collected pre-intervention, then post-intervention for 7.5 months and compared.

SETTING AND SAMPLE: Attending oncologists, nurse practitioner, and house staff from the …

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 …

United States Acculturation And Cancer Patients’ End-Of-Life Care, Alexi A. Wright, Heather Stieglitz, Yankel M. Kupersztoch, M. Elizabeth Paulk, Yookyung Kim, Ingrid T. Katz, Francisco Munoz, Rachel B. Jimenez, Jan Mutchler, Lorna Rivera, Anthony L. Back, Holly G. Prigerson

Women’s and Gender Studies Faculty Publication Series

Background: Culture shapes how people understand illness and death, but few studies examine whether acculturation influences patients’ end-of-life treatment preferences and medical care.

Methods and Findings: In this multi-site, prospective, longitudinal cohort study of terminally-ill cancer patients and their caregivers (n = 171 dyads), trained interviewers administered the United States Acculturation Scale (USAS). The USAS is a 19- item scale developed to assess the degree of ‘‘Americanization’’ in first generation or non-US born caregivers of terminally-ill cancer patients. We evaluated the internal consistency, concurrent, criterion, and content validity of the USAS. We also examined whether caregivers’ USAS scores predicted patients’ …

Few U.S. Public Health Schools Offer Courses On Palliative And End-Of-Life Care Policy, Dale Lupu, Caroline Deneszczuk, Tara Leystra, Rebecca Mckinnon, Victoria Seng

Physical Therapy and Health Care Sciences Faculty Publications

Background: Palliative care has been identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a critical policy element for the relief of suffering, yet palliative care policy receives minimal attention in mainstream U.S. public health journals, conferences, or textbooks. In the ’90s, documentation of the lack of attention to end-of-life and palliative care in medical and nursing curricula led to concerted efforts to improve medical and nursing education in palliative care. No such educational effort has yet been directed toward public health professionals.

Objective: This study's objective was to quantify current course offerings covering palliative and end-of-life care from a public …

Gently Into The Good Night: Toward A Compassionate Response To End-Stage Illness, George P. Smith Ii

Scholarly Articles

End-of-life decision making by health care providers must respect individual patient values. Indeed, these values must always be viewed as the baseline for developing and pursuing patient-centered palliative care for those with terminal illness. Co-ordinate with this fundamental bioethics principle is that of beneficence or, in other words, respect for conduct which benefits the dying patient by alleviating end-stage suffering — be it physical or existential. Compassion, charity, agape and/or just common sense, should be a part of setting normative standards and of legislative and judicial responses to the task of managing death. Aided by the principles of medical futility, …

Assessing Depression In Cancer Patients : A Longitudinal Comparison Of Three Questionnaires., Patrick Possel, Kerstin Knopf

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The article by Johns et al. (1) compares the Hopkins Symptom Checklist 20-item depression scale (HSCL-20) (2), the Short-Form 36 Mental Health Inventory five-item distress scale (MHI-5) (3), and the Patient Health Questionnaire nine-item depression scale (PHQ-9) (4) in 309 adults with cancer in a longitudinal study.