Journal of palliative medicine
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The National Consensus Project for Quality Palliative Care (NCP) has put forth eight domains of clinical practice guidelines that address the multidisciplinary nature of palliative and end-of-life (EOL) care. Extant surveys to assess education needs of palliative and EOL workers, however, have been constructed for individual professions. Thus we developed the End-of-life Professional Caregiver Survey (EPCS) as an instrument for assessing the palliative and EOL care-specific educational needs of multidisciplinary professionals.
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Nurses play an integral role in providing care for patients with end of life (EOL) symptoms refractory to conventional treatments and that may necessitate palliative sedation (PS). A paucity of research on nurses' attitudes, knowledge, and experience with PS exists, despite nurses being instrumental in evaluating its appropriateness and carrying out the care plan. ⋯ Nurses identified knowledge, skills, and guidelines as key considerations for implementing PS. Comprehensive policies along with adequate training are needed to expand the availability of PS in acute care hospitals and hospice programs.
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Case Reports
"Her husband doesn't speak much English": conducting a family meeting with an interpreter.
A growing percentage of critically ill patients and their families in the United States speak limited English. We present the case of a palliative care consult conducted across language barriers to frame a discussion about the use of interpreters for family meetings, including the evidence for using a professional interpreter, the burden experienced by interpreters involved in end-of-life discussions, potential challenges encountered when conducting a family meeting with an interpreter, and recommended best practices for interpreter use in these settings.
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To investigate the strength of association between trainees' self-assessments of the quality of their end-of-life communication skills and the assessments of their patients, patients' families, and clinician-evaluators. ⋯ Trainee self-evaluations do not predict assessments by their patients, patients' families, or their clinician-evaluators regarding the quality of end-of-life communication. Although these results should be confirmed using the same measures across all raters, in the meantime efforts to improve communication about end-of-life care should consider outcomes other than physician self-assessment to determine intervention success.