Rooted in everyday hospital medicine, Palliative Skills for Frontline Clinicians addresses the challenges of delivering complex care to patients living with serious illnesses. Spanning emergency medicine, internal medicine, surgery and various subspecialties, each chapter reads like a story, comparing usual care with a step-by-step palliative-based approach. This case-based book features a multidisciplinary, palliative-trained authorship, including neurologists, nephrologists, emergency physicians, surgeons, intensivists, and obstetricians. Divided into four parts, Palliative Skills for Frontline Clinicians outlines common clinical scenarios across settings and specialties to highlight unmet needs of patients with potentially terminal illnesses. Each case is broken down into the usual standard approach, and delves into detail regarding different palliative interventions that can be appropriate in those scenarios. These are meant to be practice changing; down to the actual words used to communicate with patients. In addition to the book’s focus on the principles of palliative care and the “art” of treating the patient, approaches to communication with the patient’s families for the best long-term outcomes are discussed. Concise and pragmatic, Palliative Skills for Frontline Clinicians is meant to be practice changing. It provides readers with both a new conceptual framework, as well as actual words to communicate with patients and medication doses for symptom management. It is an invaluable resource for non-palliative trained clinicians who wish to strengthen their palliative care skills.

With a focus on end-of-life discussion in aging and chronically ill populations, this book offers insight into the skill of communicating in complex and emotionally charged discussions. This text is written for all clinicians and professionals in the fields of healthcare and public health who are faced with questions of ethical deliberation when a patient’s illness turns from chronic to terminal. This skill is required to manage care well in an age of advanced technology, and numerous autonomous choices. With a palliative care and ethics focus, the manuscript provides case studies illustrating issues which occur in the acuity and chronicity of end of life. Clear tools for clinicians, such as scripting and “the advance care planning video library" are included. The book focuses on the unique concept of outpatient ethics, including readmission prevention and shortened length of stay through good communication for clinicians who will be required to conduct this discussion with patients. The ethical undertone in this text provides a perfect opening for application in healthcare ethics classes, both in fields of public health and healthcare. Medical scholars and physicians, nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants, as well as social workers, both in practice and training, will benefit from this text.

This comprehensive revision of the invaluable reference presents a rigorous survey of pain and palliative care phenomena across the lifespan and across disciplines. Grounded in the biopsychosocial viewpoint of its predecessor, it offers up-to-date understanding of assessments and interventions for pain, the communication of pain, common pain conditions and their mechanisms, and research and policy issues. In keeping with the current public attention to painkiller use and misuse, contributors discuss a full range of pharmacological and non-pharmacological approaches to pain relief and management. And palliative care is given expanded coverage, with chapters on interventive, ethical, and spiritual concerns. · Pain, intercultural communication, and narrative medicine. · Assessment of pain: tools, challenges, and special populations. · Persistent pain in the older adult: practical considerations for evaluation and management. · Acute to chronic pain: transition in the post-surgical patient. · Evidence-based pharmacotherapy of chronic pain. · Complementary and integrative health in chronic pain and palliative care. · The patient’s perspective of chronic pain. · Disparities in pain and pain care. This mix of evolving and emerging topics makes the Second Edition of the Handbook of Pain and Palliative Care a necessity for health practitioners specializing in pain management or palliative care, clinical and health psychologists, public health professionals, and clinicians and administrators in long-term care and hospice.

Part of the Integrating Palliative Care series, this volume on surgical palliative care guides readers through the core palliative skills and knowledge needed to deliver high value care for patients with life-limiting, critical, and terminal illness under surgical care. Surgical Palliative Care is an ideal resource for surgeons, surgical nurses, intensivists, and other practitioners who wish to learn more about integrating palliative care into the surgical field.

This book critically explores global challenges from linguistic and literary standpoints aimed at contributing towards their mitigation. Composed of two parts, contributors to the first section examine issues such as language use in the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon, the Covid-19 pandemic, migration, ethnic conflict, hate speech and language shift. The second part comprises essays that foreground global problems in literary texts. Contributors survey global problems like terrorism, gender inequality, racism and neo-colonialism, which engender horror and fuel violence. Drawn from various literary texts from Cameroon, Africa, Europe and America, contributors propose language and literature responses to global issues. These include using appropriate language and concrete techniques to assist citizens and world leaders convey precise messages for better understanding and nation-building. New communication strategies could also be adopted to keep life going and improve solidarity worldwide. Finally, contributors submit that dialogue could be a panacea through stakeholder collaboration and that negotiation is a productive solution to peace and harmony.

Offering practical, comprehensive coverage of the many nuanced technical and clinical aspects of this growing field, Palliative Radiation Oncology provides up-to-date clinical guidance in a thorough yet concise manner. In an easy-access format, it integrates basic science, pathologies, and research with clinical applications, covering different ways to approach problems, tumor assessment, precise target definition, and dosing-specific guidelines to minimize side effects/toxicities while balancing with desired outcomes. - Discusses optimal communication skills for pediatric, adult, and elderly patients. - Contains decision-making algorithms to guide individualized palliative radiation oncology treatment plans. - Reviews all the latest modalities with technical tips and pitfalls. - Covers key procedures such as external beam radiation therapy, intensity modulated radiation therapy, stereotactic body radiation therapy, and stereotactic radiosurgery. - Features step-by-step body site-specific guidelines with integrated symptom and toxicity management. - Covers symptom and symptom-cluster management, including pain and psychosocial or spiritual distress. - Ideal for radiation oncology residents, fellows, and practitioners, as well as medical oncologists, surgical oncologists, oncology nurses, and radiation technicians—all clinicians who work in this highly collaborative, team-based specialty.

Patient-centered, high-quality health care relies on the well-being, health, and safety of health care clinicians. However, alarmingly high rates of clinician burnout in the United States are detrimental to the quality of care being provided, harmful to individuals in the workforce, and costly. It is important to take a systemic approach to address burnout that focuses on the structure, organization, and culture of health care. Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being builds upon two groundbreaking reports from the past twenty years, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century, which both called attention to the issues around patient safety and quality of care. This report explores the extent, consequences, and contributing factors of clinician burnout and provides a framework for a systems approach to clinician burnout and professional well-being, a research agenda to advance clinician well-being, and recommendations for the field.

This sixth edition of the Oxford Textbook of Palliative Medicine takes us now into the third decade for this definitive award-winning textbook. It has been rigorously updated to offer a truly global perspective, highlighting the best current evidence-based practices, and collective wisdom from more than 200 experts around the world. This leading textbook covers all the new and emerging topics, updated and restructured to reflect major developments in the increasingly widespread acceptance of palliative medicine as a fundamental public health need. The sixth edition includes new sections devoted to family and caregiver issues, cardio-respiratory symptoms and disorders, and genitourinary symptoms and disorders. In addition, the multi-disciplinary nature of palliative care is emphasized throughout the textbook, covering areas from ethical and communication issues, the treatment of symptoms, and the management of pain. The Oxford Textbook of Palliative Medicine is a truly comprehensive text. No hospital, hospice, palliative care service, or medical library should be without this essential source of information. This sixth edition of the Oxford Textbook of Palliative Medicine is dedicated to the memory of Professor Kenneth Fearon husband of Professor Marie Fallon and a surgeon who became a world leader in the research and management of anorexia and cachexia. He modeled a work-life balance that is so critical in our field, with devotion to both his patients and his family.

Communication is a core skill for medical professionals when treating patients, and cancer and palliative care present some of the most challenging clinical situations. This book provides a comprehensive curriculum to help oncology specialists optimize their communication skills.