Journal of pain and symptom management
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Jan 2018
Development and Validation of a Family Meeting Assessment Tool (FMAT).
A cornerstone procedure in Palliative Medicine is to perform family meetings. Learning how to lead a family meeting is an important skill for physicians and others who care for patients with serious illnesses and their families. There is limited evidence on how to assess best practice behaviors during end-of-life family meetings. ⋯ Expert-based content, high inter-rater reliability, good internal consistency, and ability to predict educational level provided initial evidence for construct validity for this novel assessment tool.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Jan 2018
Reflection on the Role of the Spirit in Finding Meaning and Healing as Clincians.
Reflections on the Role of the Spirit in Finding Meaning and Healing as Clinicians is based on a presentation for the George Washington Spirituality and Health Summer Institute on July 13, 2017. The presentation invited health care professionals to explore contemplative practices as ways to invite the Spirit to strengthening their resilience in caring for themselves and others. ⋯ This reflection draws on resilience research that finds that contemplative practices such as deep breathing, meditation, reflective writing, and peer or community support enhance ways of meaning making and healing. Contemplative practices are provided, which can connect clinicians to the Spirit with the purpose of leading to increased meaning and healing in self and relationships.
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The role of the professional chaplain on the palliative care team in the health care setting formalizes the concern for the emotional, spiritual, and social well-being of the care recipients and their caregivers. The chaplain also has a peculiar role on the team, in that her most fundamental task is her intentional listening-and-hearing of the other person's story. ⋯ This self-appointed sobriquet resonates with the author's embrace of the theory and practice of the late theologian, educator, and civil rights activist Nelle Morton, who coined the phrase "hearing into speech" to describe the process by which another person, through being truly heard and entering into a relationship with the hearer, claims her/his own truth, hope, and identity in the face of adversity. The chaplain as Story Catcher functions as the agent of healing and hope for those who choose to tell their stories and are heard, as they resist their illness and death rather than submit to its indignity.