The Role of Palliative Medicine in Cancer Patient Care

Author(s):  
William M. Mitchell ◽  
Charles F. von Gunten
Author(s):  
Alan Baron ◽  
John Hassard ◽  
Fiona Cheetham ◽  
Sudi Sharifi

This chapter looks ‘outside’ the Hospice at issues of the organization’s image. The authors talked to staff, volunteers, and members of the general public, as well as to a number of key stakeholders in the local healthcare community, in order to gauge their views on the host organization. The analysis examines the problems associated with the image of hospices and discusses attempts of staff and volunteers to ‘dispel the myths’ about the nature of hospice care work—a form of labour which potentially runs the risk of being characterized as ‘dirty work’. The chapter then examines how the Hospice is seen in the eyes of other healthcare professionals and discusses the choice of palliative medicine as a career for junior medics. Finally it discusses a degree of ‘confusion’ that staff and volunteers claim exists in the minds of GPs and consultants in specialist cancer hospitals about the role of hospices.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 220-221
Author(s):  
George Winter

George Winter examines the importance of effective communication within pharmaceutical practice, drawing upon papers that explore the role of language within patient care


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Afarin Rajaei ◽  
Saeideh Heshmati

The present study draws attention to the significance of considering mindfulness and spiritual well-being on cancer-related distress among couples with cancer during the pandemic. Dyadic data was analyzed among couples with cancer (80 couples; N=160) to examine the within-person (actor effects) and between-partner (partner effects) associations among links between mindfulness, spiritual well-being, and cancer-related distress through the use of the actor-partner interdependence model (APIM; Kashy & Kenny, 2000). Significant actor and/or partner effects were found for mindfulness and spiritual well-being in couples with cancer, a factor that predicted cancer-related distress. Spirituality seemed to only play an important role in patients’ own cancer-related distress (actor effect), with patients’ higher levels of spiritual well-being predicting patients’ lower levels of distress. On the other hand, mindfulness was not only significantly related to the cancer patient and partner’s own distress (actor effect), partner’s mindfulness was also significantly associated with the patient’s distress (partner effect). The findings underscore the need to adopt a systemic perspective that accounts for multiple, simultaneous adaptive processes including mindfulness and spiritual well-being as influences on cancer-related distress in the time of COVID-19.


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