Journal of pain and symptom management
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Accurate prognostication is challenging in the setting of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, due to rapidly changing data, studies that are not generalizable, and lack of morbidity and functional outcomes in survivors. To provide meaningful guidance to patients, existing mortality data must be considered and appropriately applied. Although most people infected with SARS-CoV-2 will recover, mortality increases with age and comorbidity in those who develop severe illness.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2020
Crisis Symptom Management and Patient Communication Protocols Are Important Tools for All Clinicians Responding to COVID-19.
Symptom management and skilled communication with patients and families are essential clinical services in the midst of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Although palliative care specialists have training in these skills, many frontline clinicians from other specialties do not. It is imperative that all clinicians responding to the coronavirus disease 2019 crisis have access to clinical tools to support symptom management and difficult patient and family communication.
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PC-FACS (FastArticleCriticalSummaries for Clinicians inPalliativeCare) provides hospice and palliative care clinicians with concise summaries of the most important findings from more than 100 medical and scientific journals. If you have colleagues who would benefit from receiving PCFACS, please encourage them to join the AAHPM at aahpm.org. Comments from readers are welcomed at pcfacs@aahpm.org.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2020
Availability of Internationally Controlled Essential Medicines in the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Section 2 of the 2019 World Health Organization Model List of Essential Medicines includes opioid analgesics formulations commonly used for the control of pain and respiratory distress, as well as sedative and anxiolytic substances such as midazolam and diazepam. These medicines, essential to palliative care, are regulated under the international drug control conventions overseen by United Nations specialized agencies and treaty bodies and under national drug control laws. Those national laws and regulations directly affect bedside availability of Internationally Controlled Essential Medicines (ICEMs). ⋯ The most prevalent symptoms in COVID-19 are breathlessness, cough, drowsiness, anxiety, agitation, and delirium. Frequently used medicines include opioids such as morphine or fentanyl and midazolam, all of them listed as ICEMs. This paper describes the issues related to the lack of availability and limited access to ICEMs during the COVID-19 pandemic in both intensive and palliative care patients in countries of all income levels and makes recommendations for improving access.
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J Pain Symptom Manage · Aug 2020
Development and Implementation of a Clinician-facing Prognostic Communication Tool for Patients with COVID-19 and Critical Illness.
Effective prognostication for a novel disease presents significant challenges, especially given the stress induced during a pandemic. We developed a point-of-care tool to summarize outcome data for critically ill patients with COVID-19 and help guide clinicians through a thoughtful prognostication process. Two authors reviewed studies of outcomes of patients with critical illness due to COVID-19 and created a visual infographic tool based on available data. ⋯ The tool also included prompts for clinician reflection designed to enhance awareness of cognitive biases that may affect prognostic accuracy. This online, open-source COVID-19 Prognostication Tool has been made available to all clinicians at our institution and is updated weekly to reflect evolving data. Our COVID-19 Prognostication Tool may provide a useful approach to promoting consistent and high-quality prognostic communication across a health care system.