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.

ABOUT DIANE BURNSIDE MURDOCK'S THE NEW ART OF DYING How would you like to die? Only you can answer this. Whatever your age, cultural identity, ethnic background, or beliefs, read this book if you want to talk about dying but don't know what you want to say. Each of us has our own special feelings, hopes, fears, and desires about this universal issue. These days, dying can happen in many different ways because of high-intensity therapies that prolong living and postpone dying. The proliferation of choices, possibilities, and alternatives can be overwhelming. The New Art of Dying is a constructive and thorough guide to empower you to make your own choices. There is no one answer for dying correctly. There's no wrong answer either. Each of us wants to get it right and do it our own way. The New Art Of Dying is a handbook for our time. This step-by-step guide to making your own choices teaches: - How to discover who you are and live life to its end - How to deal with dying in your own unique way - How to make decisions about life-sustaining treatments and procedures, palliative care, and legal documents on advance care planning - How to keep unpredictable problems from upsetting what you want - How to give loved ones the gift of caring for you the way you wish It is progressive about patient rights, making you the central figure and enabling you to experience dying the way you have experienced life- by being in charge of your own destiny. It's for you only, a continuing reference and source of inspiration. An expose on the American way of dying - penetrating and passionate...it speaks the truth. Scrupulously confronting the many options to choose from whether medical, palliative or legal - the problems we face and what can go wrong. Revelatory, helping you get at your attitudes on dying coming from your background and beliefs to create a personal end-of-life experience.

Having a rare blood type, after a 20 year wait for a successful transplant, transplant survivor, author David Fraser Wright learned that having a sense of humor about medicine and medical situations is as important as the technical knowledge and loving care one receives along the way.

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.

Since the efforts of Dame Cicely Saunders and the founders of the modern hospice movement, compassion has become a fundamental part of palliative care. In this ground-breaking book, international experts give their critical thoughts on the essence and role of compassion, in both palliative and hospice care over the past half-century. Compassion: The essence of palliative and end-of-life care provides insight into the motivations for, and practice of, compassionate palliative and hospice care, featuring the reflections of leading healthcare professionals, social workers, chaplains and educators. Chapters utilise case examples and first-hand experiences to explore the historical and contemporary discourse surrounding the concept of compassion in palliative medicine. This book is relevant to a multidisciplinary audience of palliative care practitioners, including undergraduate and graduate students in sociology, psychology and theology, and healthcare professionals in oncology and gerontology.

A collection of inspiring stories about people facing a life-threatening illness told through the memoir of a hospice nurse

About her career as a Hospice Nurse and her book, Margaret Dodson says: I have been honored to share in the living, dying, and deaths of the most extraordinary "ordinary" people. I have entered into lives months away from their dying and moments away from their dying. Each person I have met in this work has been etched into my heart; how could I help but be touched by them? I realized that I needed to go away for a few days with a list of the people and families I had cared for during the year, and I needed time to spend my "last visit" with them privately to say goodbye. As I sat looking at the sea and feeling so full of these stories, they began to pour from me onto these pages. I would look at a name and I was transported not only to that person but also to that family, their home, the conversations, the intimacies, the suffering, the peace and even the joy. It would be presumptuous to say I have become wise by these experiences, but my gratitude for this enrichment is boundless. Much of the time I do not feel wise; yet, as the years have passed and the stories accumulate, I do feel as though I have acquired lessons to share. The lessons Margaret has learned are this book.

With an 'Attitude of Gratitude', author David Fraser Wright survived a 20 year wait for a liver transplant. He has selected ideas, artwork, and reactions to events, over that time, and presents them to you, from a year by year compilation - with the most inspirational one from each year, followed by an idea guide for 'What's Next?'.