Journal of palliative medicine
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Helping families make end-of-life decisions requires close collaboration between physicians and nurses. However, medical and nursing students have little formal training in how to collaborate in this task, and few instruments are available to measure collaborative behaviors. ⋯ Development of an end-of-life CBOAT clarified the important collaborative behaviors needed by physician and nurse. The resulting instruments provide a helpful guide for teaching interprofessional sessions related to the end of life and measuring student outcomes using an objective strategy.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Exploring the collective hospice caregiving experience.
Collective caregiving, performed by caregivers working in pairs (informal primary and secondary caregivers working together), is common in the hospice setting. Research suggests that caregiving pairs may experience different caregiver outcomes. However, little is known about how caregiving pairs differ from solo caregivers (informal primary caregivers) on outcome measures. ⋯ Despite assumptions that social support is positively facilitated vis-a-vis collective caregiving, caregiving pairs may be at higher risk for anxiety and depression. Future research is needed to address why individuals become anxious and/or depressed when working as part of a caregiving pair.
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Transfusion is not an exceptional circumstance in palliative cancer patients (PCPs). This makes it necessary to confront not only medical aspects but also those of infrastructure and ethical issues. On some occasions, literature needs to be consulted to work out the best approach in a patient's particular case. Our aim was to review the literature contained in PubMed and EMBASE so as to find out about the information available on transfusion in PCPs. ⋯ Although transfusion is certainly a common practice in PCPs, there is a relative lack of literature on this topic. Publications are unconnected and hardly any prospective studies have been performed. A large part of the little literature available only concerns descriptive and very general aspects of the issue. As transfusional products and financial and human resources are finite, it would be desirable to establish clear research lines on the different aspects considered (clinical, infrastructure, and ethical) that can help clinicians, nurses, patients, and carers to make a decision.