Ethics, Palliative Care, & Chaplaincy - Hospice & Palliative Care

The first comprehensive clinical guide for practicing palliative care and hospice clinicians, this evidence-based reference is designed to promote best practices in the delivery of safe, compassionate patient care. With a dual focus on evaluation and intervention, the book covers all aspects of providing palliative and hospice care for vulnerable and diverse populations. It provides an overview of common disease manifestations, typical trajectories of illness, symptom management, and recommendations for nursing care.

The aging population has only grown since the first edition of this comprehensive and seminal publication released nearly 20 years ago. Based on the need to humanize rather than medicalize the illness experience for patients, Palliative Care Nursing: Quality Care to the End of Life, Fifth Edition, delves into palliative care beyond the specific diseases affecting the patient. ICU nursing and ICU style help is impersonal and outdated. Instead, this textbook focuses on the wholesome caregiving to benefit the patient and their support network.

Palliative patients struggle with debilitating and painful conditions, and because their condition is chronic, they grapple with the fact that life as they knew it has ended. Families and friends also suffer. They don't know how to help and therefore become secondary victims of the disease. Traditionally, ICU units and have focused on just treatment, and patients, family, and friends suffered. Today, modern medical advances have expanded to include empathy, and have learned how to harness the power of an entire team to help the patient and their support network strengthen their resilience, cure what can be cured, and maintain meaning and purpose in life.

Palliative Care Nursing, Fifth Edition delivers advanced empirical, aesthetic, ethical and personal knowledge. This new edition brings an increased focus on outcomes, benchmarking progress, and goals of care. It expounds upon the importance of the cross-disciplinary collaboration introduced in the previous edition. Every chapter in Sections I, II, and III includes content written by a non-nursing member of the interprofessional team. Based on best-evidence and clinical practice guidelines, this text presents comprehensive, targeted interventions responsive to the needs of palliative and hospice patients and family. Each chapter contains compassionate, timely, appropriate, and cost-effective care for diverse populations across the illness trajectory.