Journal of pain and symptom management
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Difficult family conversations are a challenge for even the most seasoned clinicians. Teaching the skills of successful communication between providers, family members, and patients are a vital component of medical education. However, traditional teaching methods using didactics and expert role modeling are often inadequate. ⋯ This train-the-educator workshop addresses a critical need in both palliative care and general medicine by enhancing the educators' skills in desiring and implanting a curriculum on communication skills of health care providers using experiential techniques with formative feedback. The authors hope that by outlining the implementation of this three-hour interactive format, future educators will adapt and utilize this workshop as it works best for their learners.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Dec 2016
A 10-Year Longitudinal Study of Effects of a Multifaceted Residency Spiritual Care Curriculum: Clinical Ability, Professional Formation, End-of-Life and Culture.
Although spiritual care (SC) is recognized as important in whole-person medicine, physicians infrequently address patients' spiritual needs, citing lack of training. Although many SC curricula descriptions exist, few studies report effects on physicians. ⋯ A longitudinal, multifaceted residency SC curriculum can have lasting positive effects on physicians' SC skills and their professional/personal formation.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Dec 2016
Staff distress improves by treating pain in nursing home patients with dementia: Results from a cluster randomized controlled trial.
Most people with dementia develop neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPSs), which are distressing for their carers. Untreated pain may increase the prevalence and severity of NPSs and thereby staff burden. ⋯ Individual pain treatment reduced staff distress in the intervention group compared to control group especially in regard to agitation-related symptoms and apathy. Furthermore, our results indicated a multifactorial model of staff distress, in which enhanced knowledge and understanding of NPSs and pain in people with advanced dementia may play an important role.