A Palliative Ethic of Care


Book Description

"An innovative approach to caring for the terminally ill patient, A palliative ethic of care provides deeper insights into why end-of-life care is so challenging and suggests how to improve the care of the dying" -- Back cover.




Ethics in Palliative Care


Book Description

This is a comprehensive analysis of ethical topics in palliative care, combining clinical experience and philosophical rigor. A broad array of topics are explored from historical, legal, clinical, and ethical perspectives, offering both the seasoned clinician and interested lay reader a thorough examination of the complex ethical issues facing patients suffering from life-threatening illness.




Ethics and Palliative Care


Book Description

Part one of this book provides an explanation of ethical theory, looks at difficult decisions at the end of life, questions autonomy and rights and covers the use of sedation at the end of life, while part two presents case histories and clinical scenarios.




Legal and Ethical Aspects of Care


Book Description

Effective palliative care that rests on a sound ethical foundation requires ongoing discussions about patient and family values and preferences. This is especially important when addressing care at end-of-life including artificial nutrition and hydration, withdrawal of life-sustaining therapies and palliative sedation as well as requests for assistance in hastening death. The eighth volume in the HPNA Palliative Nursing Manuals series, Legal and Ethical Aspects of Palliative Care, provides an overview of critical communication skills and formal organizational mechanisms, such as ethics committees and interdisciplinary rounds, required for decisions in ethical dilemmas which respect diversity in the views of colleagues, as well as patients. The content of the concise, clinically focused volumes in the HPNA Palliative Nursing Manuals series is one resource for nurses preparing for specialty certification exams and provides a quick-reference in daily practice.




Palliative Care and Ethics


Book Description

Hospice is the premiere end of life program in the United States, but its requirement that patients forgo disease-directed therapies and that they have a prognosis of 6 months or less means that it serves less than half of dying patients and often for very short periods of time. Palliative care offers careful attention to pain and symptom management, added support for patients and families, and assistance with difficult medical decision making alongside any and all desired medical treatments, but it does not include a comprehensive system of care as is provided by hospice. The practice of palliative care and hospice is filled with sometimes overt (requests for hastened death in an environment where such acts are legally prohibited) and other times covert (the delay in palliative care referral because the health care team believes it will undermine disease directed treatment) ethical issues. The contributors to this volume use a series of case presentations within each chapter to illustrate some of the palliative care and hospice challenges with significant ethical dimensions across the three overarching domains: 1) care delivery systems; 2) addressing the many dimensions of suffering; and 3) difficult decisions near the end of life. The contributors are among the most experienced palliative care, hospice and ethics scholars in North America and Western Europe. Each has been given relatively free reign to address what they feel are the most pressing ethical challenges within their domain, so a wide range of positions and vantage points are represented. As a result, the volume provides a very diverse ethical exploration of this relatively young field that can deepen, stretch, and at times confront any simple notion of the challenges facing patients, their families, professional caregivers, and policy makers.




Hospice Ethics


Book Description

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.




Partners in Palliative Care


Book Description

The Collaborative for Palliative Care ("Collaborative") is a grassroots consortium of public and private organizations that came together in 2005 for the purposes of studying the increasing need for palliative care and the methods for such care. It has grown from a small fledgling group to a membership of over 50 community-based organizations and volunteers dedicated to improving care of the seriously ill through education, research and advocacy. The Collaborative bridges policy, research and practice in its initiatives and vision for the future. Partners in Palliative Care examines specific areas of concern that the Collaborative has addressed in its education programs and advocacy, as well as the collaborative processes that have been so successful in building community assets. Areas of concentration have been diverse and include advance care planning, relational communication paradigms, community capacity building, the role of culture and spirituality in palliative care, the meaning of pain and suffering for seriously ill individuals, and the ethics of health care costs in palliative and end-of-life systems of care. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Social Work in End-of-Life and Palliative Care.




Ethical Issues in Palliative Care


Book Description

Initial definitions and some theoretical input leads on to a practice-based text which will enable people from a variety of professions to discuss and debate issues familiar to their practice.




Law, Palliative Care and Dying


Book Description

Law, Palliative Care and Dying critically examines the role of the legal framework in shaping the boundaries of palliative care practice. The work underlines the importance of a distinct legal framework for specialist palliative care which can provide clarity for both the healthcare professional and the patient. It examines the legal and ethical justifications for specialist palliative care practices and, in doing so, it questions the legitimacy of the distinction between euthanasia and practices such as palliative sedation. Moreover, this work discusses the influence of a human rights discourse on palliative care and examines the contribution of autonomy, dignity, and the right to palliative care. This book includes detailed comparative research on several European jurisdictions. The jurisdictions illustrate varied approaches to palliative care regulation and promotion. In this manner, the role of professional guidelines and legislation are drawn out and common themes in the regulation of palliative care emerge.




Palliative Care and End-of-Life Decisions


Book Description

Total pain management mandates that an ethic of adjusted care be implemented at the end-stage of life which acknowledges ethically, legally, and clinically the use of terminal sedation as efficacious treatment.