Palliative medicine
-
Palliative medicine · Mar 2022
Family involvement in advance care planning for people living with advanced cancer: A systematic mixed-methods review.
Advance care planning is important for people with advanced cancer. Family involvement in advance care planning may be instrumental to achieving goal-concordant care since they frequently become surrogate decision-makers. ⋯ This review provides a comprehensive understanding of family involvement in advance care planning and could inform its assessment and implementation in clinical practice. The number of included articles was limited. Therefore future research must focus on family integration and exploration of stakeholders' perceptions to identify additional components and linkages between them within family-integrated advance care planning.
-
Palliative medicine · Mar 2022
Integrating lived experiences of out-of-hours health services for people with palliative and end-of-life care needs with national datasets for people dying in Scotland in 2016: A mixed methods, multi-stage design.
Unscheduled care is used increasingly during the last year of life by people known to have significant palliative care needs. ⋯ Strengthening unscheduled care in the community, together with patient and public information about how to access these services could prevent hospital admissions of low benefit and enhance community support for people living with advanced illness.
-
Palliative medicine · Mar 2022
C-reactive protein and white blood cell count are adverse prognostic markers for patients with advanced cancer on parenteral nutrition in a palliative care unit setting: A retrospective cohort study.
Parenteral nutrition is controversial in patients with advanced cancer. Nevertheless, this treatment is common practice near the end of life. ⋯ Patients who responded with an increase of C-reactive protein or white blood cell count during 2 weeks after reinitiation or start of parenteral nutrition had a worse survival. Our findings might support clinicians and patients in their decision to forgo parenteral nutrition in a palliative care setting.