Palliative medicine
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Palliative medicine · Mar 2022
Paramedics delivering palliative and end-of-life care in community-based settings: A systematic integrative review with thematic synthesis.
There is a growing demand for community palliative care and home-based deaths worldwide. However, gaps remain in this service provision, particularly after-hours. Paramedicine may help to bridge that gap and avoid unwanted hospital admissions, but a systematic overview of paramedics' potential role in palliative and end-of-life care is lacking. ⋯ Paramedics are a highly skilled workforce capable of helping to deliver palliative and end-of-life care to people in their homes and reducing avoidable hospital admissions, particularly for palliative emergencies. Future research should focus on investigating the efficacy of palliative care clinical practice guideline implementation for paramedics, understanding other healthcare professionals' perspectives, and undertaking health economic evaluations of targeted interventions.
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Palliative medicine · Mar 2022
Palliative care needs and experiences of people in prison: A systematic review and meta-synthesis.
Globally, the prison population is growing and ageing, as is the need for palliative care. Yet, little is known about how people in prison perceive palliative care provision in this setting. ⋯ People in prison expect to receive high-quality palliative care, but their experiences often do not match their expectations. Numerous structural and organisational challenges complicate the provision of palliative care in prisons, limiting accessibility of care.
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Palliative medicine · Mar 2022
Area-Based Compassionate Communities: A systematic integrative review of existing initiatives worldwide.
Area-Based Compassionate Communities are community public health interventions which focus on the role of the community in palliative care provision. They apply a set of actions based on the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion which aims to increase people's control over their health. ⋯ While the concept of Area-Based Compassionate Communities is gaining momentum as a new paradigm for the creation of palliative care capacity across society, only a handful of initiatives have been described. The lack of formal evaluations of their envisaged health benefits indicates a pressing need for rigorous research about ongoing and future initiatives.
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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.