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
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.