Through The Hospice Heritage: Celebrating Our Future, physicians, nurses, social workers, and clergy will find unique examples to give patients the attention, care, and understanding they need at that time in their life. Since 80 of people who die do so without the support of a hospice program, this important book offers approaches designed to expand access to hospice and provide a solid foundation of treatment for patients with cancer and non-cancer diagnoses. Written by experts in the field, The Hospice Heritage will help you care for those patients whose life span is uncertain, improving their quality of life in throughout their last days. This commemorative book offers an encompassing portrayal of the development of hospice from its origins to its present forms. The Hospice Heritage contains state-of-the-art presentations of hospice-related issues and examines current efforts in hospice and palliative care, including the latest concepts in symptom control, guidelines for patients with diseases other than cancer, and measuring the quality and impact of care. Informative and moving, The Hospice Heritage explores the physical, psychological, social, and spiritual aspects of end-of-life care. This important book discusses many topics relevant to hospice today, including: presenting the most common physical symptoms experienced by hospice patients and the comprehensive standards of care for these symptoms; deepening the spiritual aspect of dying as patients, families, and care providers seek understanding and resolution; examining end-of-life decision-making issues, and the barriers which continue to restrict patient and family involvement and choices and identifying the evolving relationship between hospice and palliative care and the consequences, benefits, and dilemmas of this partnership.

Hospice care is one of the fastest-growing segments of the U. S. healthcare system, a trend that is expected to accelerate as the median age of the population continues to rise over the next three decades. Despite over forty percent of the population now dying while on hospice care, very little has been published on the ethical opportunities and challenges experienced in the everyday lives of those giving and receiving hospice care. This book is the first comprehensive collection devoted to analyzing distinctive ethical issues arising in the delivery of hospice care and designed to promote best ethical practices for hospice care professionals and organizations. Thirteen newly commissioned chapters by seventeen hospice experts populate three thematic sections of the book, each devoted to an aspect of the intersection between ethics and hospice care. Contributors have unique qualifications and abilities to articulate and respond to ethically significant phenomena that -- while not always unique to hospice care -- arise in especially poignant and complex ways when caring for patients enrolled in hospice. As the shift or return to home-based care at the end of life continues, hospice professionals and programs will be faced with a broader array of terminal illnesses, cultural beliefs and traditions, and patient and family values than ever before. Hospice will no longer be tailored solely to the final stage of cancer, but will need to accommodate patients whose illnesses are variable in their progression and whose treatment plans include many medical options. The ethical orientations and frameworks that have served hospice for the past 50 years will need to be supplemented and refined if hospice is to fulfill this changing social mission. Hospice Ethics explores a new paradigm for hospice ethics from a multi-disciplinary and provides an important educational resource for professional training in end of life care.

This book on the history of palliative care, 1500-1970 traces the historical roots of modern palliative care in Europe to the rise of the hospice movement in the 1960s. The author discusses largely forgotten premodern concepts like cura palliativa and euthanasia medica and describes, how patients and physicians experienced and dealt with terminal illness. He traces the origins of hospitals for incurable and dying patients and follows the long history of ethical debates on issues like truth-telling and the intentional shortening of the dying patients’ lives and the controversies they sparked between physicians and patients. An eye opener for anyone interested in the history of ethical decision making regarding terminal care of critically ill patients.

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The first resource on end-of-life care for healthcare practitioners who work with the terminally ill and their families, Living with Dying begins with the narratives of five healthcare professionals, who, when faced with overwhelming personal losses altered their clinical practices and philosophies. The book provides ways to ensure a respectful death for individuals, families, groups, and communities and is organized around theoretical issues in loss, grief, and bereavement and around clinical practice with individuals, families, and groups. Living with Dying addresses practice with people who have specific illnesses such as AIDS, bone marrow disease, and cancer and pays special attention to patients who have been stigmatized by culture, ability, sexual orientation, age, race, or homelessness. The book includes content on trauma and developmental issues for children, adults, and the aging who are dying, and it addresses legal, ethical, spiritual, cultural, and social class issues as core factors in the assessment of and work with the dying. It explores interdisciplinary teamwork, supervision, and the organizational and financing contexts in which dying occurs. Current research in end-of-life care, ways to provide leadership in the field, and a call for compassion, insight, and respect for the dying makes this an indispensable resource for social workers, healthcare educators, administrators, consultants, advocates, and practitioners who work with the dying and their families.

This text is the definitive resource for practicing palliative social work clinicians. It is designed to meet the needs of professionals who seek to provide culturally sensitive biopsychosocial-spiritual care for patients and families living with life-threatening illness.

Essential information for anyone involved in palliative care programs for deprived patients! In this comprehensive resource, leading healthcare professionals describe pioneering work on the front lines of pain and palliative care service planning and implementation for underserved populations. Pain and Palliative Care in the Developing World and Marginalized Populations: A Global Challenge explores the challenges and barriers preventing satisfactory pain management for patients who urgently need it. This book provides you with true accounts of palliative care programs from around the world to help you meet the needs of disadvantaged clients. This essential volume includes a Foreword written by a world leader in palliative care—Jan Stjernsward, Former Chief of the Cancer and Palliative Care Program of the World Health Organization and currently International Director of the Oxford International Centre for Palliative Care in the United Kingdom. Pain and Palliative Care in the Developing World and Marginalized Populations: A Global Challenge addresses issues of vital importance for the global health care community, such as: Why do so many people in the developing world suffer excruciating pain for months and years, when simple inexpensive medication could make them comfortable? They get MRI scans; why don’t they have access to palliative care? Why do some palliative care programs fail to reach the needy? How could a palliative care delivery system be adapted to local needs? Why are medical and nursing students not taught the fundamentals of pain management? What direction should palliative care education take? Could health care resources be channeled to deliver care in a more just and equitable manner? This book chronicles the efforts of ambitious pain management care professionals to confront these questions, working toward an end to needless, preventable pain and suffering. It examines their programs, and acknowledges their successes and failures to date, with commentaries by international experts. This indispensable manual discusses palliative care programs in developing countries such as India, Chile, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and others. Pain and Palliative Care in the Developing World and Marginalized Populations also offers an important look at pain management programs geared toward several specific underserved populations in both developing and developed countries, including Native Americans and inmates in a New Zealand prison. Illustrated with figures, graphs, and tables, this book is essential for practitioners and officials in both palliative and public health care. All proceeds from sales of this book will be used to support the growth of palliative care programs in India.