Journal of pain and symptom management
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J Pain Symptom Manage · May 2015
Multicenter StudyUse of an Item Bank to Develop Two Short-Form FAMCARE Scales to Measure Family Satisfaction With Care in the Setting of Serious Illness.
Family satisfaction is an important and commonly used research measure. Yet current measures of family satisfaction are lengthy and may be unnecessarily burdensome--particularly in the setting of serious illness. ⋯ The FAMCARE-10 and FAMCARE-5 short-form scales evidenced high reliability across sociodemographic subgroups and are potentially less burdensome and time-consuming scales for monitoring family satisfaction among seriously ill patients.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · May 2015
Review Meta Analysis Comparative StudyMeasuring Experience With End-of-Life Care: A Systematic Literature Review.
Increasing interest in end-of-life care has resulted in many tools to measure the quality of care. An important outcome measure of end-of-life care is the family members' or caregivers' experiences of care. ⋯ This review identified several comprehensive surveys aimed at measuring the experiences of end-of-life care, covering a variety of content areas and practical issues for survey administration. Future work should focus on standardizing surveys and administration methods so that experiences of care can be reliably measured and compared across care settings.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · May 2015
Multicenter StudyQuality of Life and Cost of Care at the End of Life: The Role of Advance Directives.
Advance directives (ADs) are expected to improve patients' end-of-life outcomes, but retrospective analyses, surrogate recall of patients' preferences, and selection bias have hampered efforts to determine ADs' effects on patient outcomes. ⋯ The associations between DNR orders and better quality of life in the week before death indicate that documenting preferences against resuscitation in medical orders may be beneficial to many patients.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · May 2015
Modified Edmonton Symptom Assessment System including constipation and sleep: validation in outpatients with cancer.
The Edmonton Symptom Assessment System (ESAS) measures the severity of nine symptoms. Constipation and sleep disturbance are common in patients with cancer, but are not currently included in the ESAS. ⋯ The ESAS-CS and ESAS-r-CS NRS versions are valid and reliable for measuring symptoms in this population of outpatients with advanced cancer. Although the ESAS-r-CS was preferred, patients favored the 24-hour time window of the ESAS-CS, which also may best characterize fluctuating symptoms.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · May 2015
Independent Validation of the Japanese Version of the EORTC QLQ-C15-PAL for Patients With Advanced Cancer.
Although the psychometric properties of the Japanese version of the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer Quality of Life Questionnaire-Core 15-Palliative Care (EORTC QLQ-C15-PAL) have been examined previously, that study had several limitations, for example, small sample size. ⋯ The Japanese version of EORTC QLQ-C15-PAL has sufficient validity, acceptable reliability, and feasibility for patients with advanced cancer.