Caring for terminally ill patients and their families is challenging. Patients with life limiting illness require the skills of many professionals but also the support of their community. While most clinicians are comfortable in assessing a broad range of physical problems, it is often the psychosocial issues that prove the most complex. These issues range from psychosocial assessment to the treatment and care of patients with life limiting illnesses. Evaluating emotional, social and spiritual needs, in particular, requires excellent teamwork. This fully-updated and expanded new edition takes a comprehensive look at current practice and provision of psychosocial support as applied to a range of palliative care patients. A number of important areas are covered including community approaches of psychosocial care, neonatal palliative care, the provision of psychosocial care to families, the role of volunteers in supporting palliative care professionals, and the needs of the frail elderly, marginalised patients, and those with dementia. Including multiple case study examples, this highly practical text examines current literature and evidence to demonstrate the best research-based practice in psychosocial care. It is an essential resource for professionals working within hospitals and communities in the fields of medicine, nursing, social work, chaplaincy, counselling, primary care, and mental health.

The essence of nursing care continually exposes nurses to suffering. Although they bear witness to the suffering of others, their own suffering is less frequently exposed. This slim volume attempts to give voice to the suffering that nurses witness in patients, families, colleagues, and themselves. By making this suffering visible, the authors wish to honor it and to learn from it.
The audience includes nurses in all phases of training and practice - from students to educators to clinicians - in the wide array of settings and specialties in which nurses care for patients. The book offers nurses' colleagues in other professions - social workers, psychologists, chaplains, ethicists, and physicians - a rare window onto what it means to practice nursing.
Drs. Ferrell and Coyle are also the editors of Textbook of Palliative Nursing, 2nd ed (Oxford, 2006). Independently, they have worked more than 50 years in oncology nursing, caring for patients and working to improve the quality of care that patients receive.

Hospices have played a critical role in transforming ideas about death and dying. Viewing death as a natural event, hospices seek to enable people approaching mortality to live as fully and painlessly as possible. Award-winning medical historian Emily K. Abel provides insight into several important issues surrounding the growth of hospice care. Using a unique set of records, Prelude to Hospice expands our understanding of the history of U.S. hospices. Compiled largely by Florence Wald, the founder of the first U.S. hospice, the records provide a detailed account of her experiences studying and caring for dying people and their families in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although Wald never published a report of her findings, she often presented her material informally. Like many others seeking to found new institutions, she believed she could garner support only by demonstrating that her facility would be superior in every respect to what currently existed. As a result, she generated inflated expectations about what a hospice could accomplish. Wald's records enable us to glimpse the complexities of the work of tending to dying people.

The Oxford American Handbook of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and Supportive Care is an easily-navigable source of information about the day-to-day management of patients requiring palliative and hospice care. The table of contents follows the core curriculum of the American Board of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, thus meeting the educational and clinical information needs of students, residents, fellows, and nurse practitioners. Succinct, evidence-based, topically-focused content is supplemented by extensive tables, algorithms, and clinical pearls. This edition includes new sections on grief and bereavement, medical marijuana, and physician assisted suicide, and has been updated throughout to incorporate National Consensus Project for Quality Palliative Care Clinical Practice Guidelines.

Publishing on the 50th anniversary of the opening of St Christopher's Hospice - widely thought of to be the first modern hospice, combining pain and symptom management with education and training - this edited collection discusses what motivates professionals and volunteers to provide spiritual care. This book shows how the world of hospice care is moving on from Cicely Saunder's, founder of St Christopher's Hospice, legacy to providing spiritual care in a more integrated manner. With entries from doctors, nurses and CEOs among others, this book informs good practice for professionals and volunteers providing spiritual care for patients and their families. It looks at how, for many of these professionals, spirituality does not have to be grounded in organised religion, but stems from understanding and providing for our human needs.

Hospice chaplains have traditionally played a unique part in palliative care, providing human compassion and support to help ease life's final chapter. This book thoughtfully tackles the question at the heart of modern hospice chaplaincy: do chaplains have a distinctive role in an increasingly secular society? A comprehensive look at why and how this work needs to be done, each chapter will be a rich resource for hospice chaplains and anyone working within a hospice multi-disciplinary team. Taking the form of reflections by chaplains and other professionals, they examine the tension between sacred and secular space, explore how spiritual care works in a changing society, and look at what voice a chaplain has within the hospice team. Essential reading for chaplains, this insightful book reflects on the important work undertaken by hospice chaplaincies and explains why they continue to be a vital resource for end-of-life care.

In the 21st century, people in the developed world are living longer. They hope they will have a healthy longer life and then die relatively quickly and peacefully. But frequently that does not happen. While people are living healthy a little longer, they tend to live sick for a lot longer. And at the end of being sick before dying, they and their families are frequently faced with daunting decisions about whether to continue life prolonging medical treatments or whether to find meaningful and forthright ways to die more easily and quickly. In this context, some people are searching for more and better options to hasten death. They may be experiencing unacceptable suffering in the present or may fear it in the near future. But they do not know the full range of options legally available to them. Voluntary stopping eating and drinking (VSED), though relatively unknown and poorly understood, is a widely available option for hastening death. VSED is legally permitted in places where medical assistance in dying (MAID) is not. And unlike U.S. jurisdictions where MAID is legally permitted, VSED is not limited to terminal illness or to those with current decision-making capacity. VSED is a compassionate option that respects patient choice. Despite its strongly misleading image of starvation, death by VSED is typically peaceful and meaningful when accompanied by adequate clinician and/or caregiver support. Moreover, the practice is not limited to avoiding unbearable suffering, but may also be used by those who are determined to avoid living with unacceptable deterioration such as severe dementia. But VSED is "not for everyone." This volume provides a realistic, appropriately critical, yet supportive assessment of the practice. Eight illustrative, previously unpublished real cases are included, receiving pragmatic analysis in each chapter. The volume's integrated, multi-professional, multi-disciplinary character makes it useful for a wide range of readers: patients considering present or future end-of-life options and their families, clinicians of all kinds, ethicists, lawyers, and institutional administrators. Appendices include recommended elements of an advance directive for stopping eating and drinking in one's future if and when decision making capacity is lost, and what to record as cause of death on the death certificates of those who hasten death by VSED.

This second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Cancer Nursing is an essential aid to the practising cancer nurse. It provides a quick reference to the key issues in cancer nursing, and a concise and systematic account of all of the main areas of cancer nursing practice. Filled with key tips and reflection points, each chapter supports professional development for the reader. The patient, their family, and the experience of cancer are at the heart of this handbook. For the new edition there is a greater focus on survivorship, drawing on recent developments in the area. The Oxford Handbook of Cancer Nursing promotes a multidisciplinary approach to cancer care, with references to current best evidence and the latest developments in treatment. Detailed guidance on complex aspects of care are outlined, integrating both psychosocial and physical care to better treat the whole patient. Written by experienced nurses, the book is laid out to enable quick access to precise, targeted information on the vast majority of potential clinical scenarios.

Psycho-Oncology in Palliative and End-of-Life Care provides expert advice and clinical management guidelines on the impact of advanced cancer and its treatment on the life and wellbeing of a patient in palliative and end-of-life care. Employing a practical toolkit format, this volume addresses a variety of key challenges including: discussions of death and dying, poor prognoses, wishes and values of the dying person, advance care plans, anxiety, demoralization and problems with coping, depression and delirium, the needs of partners, children, families, and caregivers, and spiritual and bereavement care. Each chapter considers presenting symptoms, differential diagnoses and assessment methods to achieve the best diagnosis, so that a detailed formulation can be developed for each person that guides a comprehensive management plan. Each section concludes with professional and service issues ranging from ethical dilemmas, legal requirements, cultural needs, and training and service development issues, through to basic human rights. Part of the Psycho-Oncology Care: Companion Guides for Clinicians series, this concise pocket guide is a resource for oncology specialists, psycho-oncologists in training, consultant nurse specialists and nurse practitioners, and allied health professionals to use as a quick reference in everyday practice. Pitched at intermediate to advanced level skills, this companion guide can be used as a standalone, or alongside existing oncology and psycho-oncology training programs.

Communication is at the heart of any complete understanding of the end of life. While it is true that individuals physically die as a single entity, the process of ending an individual life is located within a complex system of relationships and roles connected and constructed through communicative processes. In this volume, top scholars from numerous disciplines showcase the latest empirical investigations and theoretical advances that focus on communication at the end of life. This multi-contextual approach serves to integrate current findings, expand our theoretical understanding of the end of life, prioritize the significance of competent communication for scholars and practitioners, and provide a solid foundation upon which to build pragmatic interventions to assist individuals at the end of life as well as those who care for and grieve for those who are dying. This book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in Death and Dying, Communication and Aging, Health Communication, Life Span Development, Life Span Communication, Long term care, Palliative care and Social Work.