Suchergebnisse

Stimulated by Downs(2003) article on Failure in Palliative Care the author reflects on the workings of a day hospice focusing on the difficult and challenging issues for patients and how the hospice setting can enable these issues to be raised and addressed. The issues are explored and illustrated using patient comments and experiences. Acknowledging a dearth of hospice day care research and literature the author seeks to motivate others and encourage a wider appreciation of day hospice and thereby influence future practice.

Hospice care is a type of care and philosophy of care that focuses on the palliation of a terminally ill or seriously ill patient's pain and symptoms, and attending to their emotional and spiritual needs (Powell 2014). The concept of hospice has been evolving since the 11th century. Then, and for centuries thereafter, hospices were places of hospitality for the sick, wounded, or dying, as well as those for travellers and pilgrims (Dossey 1999). The modern concept of hospice includes palliative care for the incurably ill given in such institutions as hospitals or nursing homes, but also care provided to those who would rather spend their last months and days of life in their own homes (McCue and Thompson 2006)

ABSTRACTThe relationships between dentist characteristics and professional education with involvement of Iowa dentists in hospice care were investigated. Using the 1999 Iowa Health Professional database, a survey requesting information regarding involvement in and training for care of hospice patients was mailed to all licensed dentists (N = 1,210). Two mailings yielded a 54.6% response rate. Of the 638 dentist respondents, the mean age was 47, 86% were male, 88% general dentists, and 295 (46%) reported providing some treatment for hospice patients. At least one dentist reported providing hospice patient care in 72 of Iowa's 99 counties. About 90% of dentists treating hospice patients were general practitioners.Males were more likely to provide treatment (p < 0.0313). Neither dentist age nor years in practice were significant predictors. Dentists were more likely to treat hospice patients in the office (IO, 40%). The most prevalent treatments were denture relines (31% IO; 71% OO), examinations (16% IO; 68% OO), and emergency treatment (12.5% IO; 53% OO). More than 86% of surveyed dentists indicated that their professional education did not adequately train them to meet the clinical, psychosocial, communication, or spiritual needs of hospice patients.

The aim of this paper is to review the situation in communist and post-revolutionary Czechoslovakia in the area of palliative care. It will familiarize readers with the enormous efforts of two big personalities in the history of Czech health care: Marie Opatrná and Marie Svatošová, who tried to change the old and inconvenient Soviet health care system and make the care of terminal and dying people more human. At the end, it will present some challenges which the current Czech hospice care is confronted with.

This ethnography reflects on a non-profit hospice care organization in the Midwestern US where caregivers "slow down" medical care by acknowledging the plurality of forces that constitute the illness experience, philosophically departing from their biomedical, non-hospice counterparts. It demonstrates the ontological effect of "slowing down" and attending to a set of patient problems that extends beyond the biological, or any distinct, domain. The result is a medical world that privileges the embodied, lived expression of disease—rather than the statistical, clinical expression—resulting in medical care that is enmeshed in the variables of everyday life. I therefore situate hospice care in a historical moment witnessing the emergence of a sophisticated and "non-modern" (Latour 1991) form of medical care.