Journal of pain and symptom management
-
J Pain Symptom Manage · Feb 2015
Quality of palliative care for patients with advanced cancer in a community consortium.
Measuring quality of care delivery is essential to palliative care program growth and sustainability. We formed the Carolinas Consortium for Palliative Care and collected a quality data registry to monitor our practice and inform quality improvement efforts. ⋯ Analyzing data on quality is feasible and valuable in community-based palliative care. Overall, processes to collect data on quality using nontechnology methods may underestimate true adherence to quality measures.
-
J Pain Symptom Manage · Feb 2015
The frequency of alcoholism in patients with advanced cancer admitted to an acute palliative care unit and a home care program.
Cancer patients with a history of alcoholism may be problematic. The frequency of alcoholism among patients with advanced cancer has never been reported in Italy or other European countries. ⋯ Only a minority of patients were CAGE positive, with a similar frequency in the PCU and HCP settings. CAGE-positive patients were more likely to be male and younger, independent of diagnosis and performance status. CAGE was positively correlated with informal interviews for detecting alcoholism. As CAGE patients express more symptom distress, it is important to detect this problem with a simple tool that has a high sensitivity and specificity and is easy to use even in patients with advanced disease.
-
J Pain Symptom Manage · Feb 2015
An important but stressful part of their future work: medical students' attitudes to palliative care throughout their course.
Palliative care (PC) education for medical students is important. Knowledge concerning drugs and services can be readily taught, and skills of communicating with terminally ill patients and their families are increasingly being addressed. Developing positive attitudes toward caring for patients near the end of life is more challenging. ⋯ Medical students' attitudes toward their future role in caring for people with PC needs were broadly positive. Core science was associated with increasingly negative attitudes and clinical studies with increasingly positive attitudes. For teaching faculty, the challenge remains to address negative and foster positive attitudes toward PC during medical school.
-
Measuring the quality of dying (QOD) experience is important for hospice providers. However, few instruments exist that assess one's QOD; and those that do have not been well validated in hospice. ⋯ Although further testing of the QOD-Hospice measures is needed, preliminary evidence suggests that the instruments are reliable and valid for use in hospice.