Expressive Arts Interventions to Improve Psychosocial Well-Being in Caregivers: A Systematic Review.

Context: Over 43 million caregivers provide care and support in the United States. Increased stress and burden may contribute to poor psychosocial well-being. Recently, there has been an emergence of art-based interventions to improve well-being among care receivers and caregivers.

Wonders & Worries: A randomized clinical trial of a psychosocial intervention for children who have a parent with cancer.

Objective: The aim of this study was to test the effectiveness of Wonders & Worries, a psychosocial intervention for children who have a parent with cancer. Primary goals were to improve family quality of life, functioning and communication skills as reported by parent and child, enhance children's emotional/behavioral adjustment and parenting efficacy, while decreasing parenting concerns and ill parents' depression and anxiety.

Methods: Sixty families were recruited from a community based non-profit agency.

Development and evaluation of the Good Grief program for young people bereaved by familial cancer.

Background: Adolescents and young adults (AYAs) bereaved by the death of a parent or sibling from cancer report unique psychosocial needs and can have difficulty adjusting to their loss. Unaddressed, this can result in poor long-term bereavement outcomes. This paper describes the development and evaluation of Good Grief - a 3-day camp-based program focused on meeting coping, social support, and respite needs of AYAs bereaved by familial cancer.

Importance of Community Impact as the Fourth Academic Mission: A Qualitative Study.

Most US medical schools have 3 primary missions: education, research, and clinical service. Recently there have been calls for a fourth primary mission focused on improving health in their surrounding communities. To date, few medical schools have done so.

Social work leadership in a medical school: A coordinated, compassionate COVID-19 response.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the systemic inequities in our health care system and society has called for actions to meet the clinical, psychosocial and educational needs in health care settings and communities. In this paper we describe how an organized Department of Health Social Work in a medical school played a unique role in responding to the challenges of a pandemic with community, clinical, and educational initiatives that were integral to our community's health.

Spiritual assessment and spiritual care offerings as a standard of care in pediatric oncology: A recommendation informed by a systematic review of the literature.

Children with cancer and their families experience shifts in spiritual wellness from diagnosis through treatment and survivorship or bereavement. An interdisciplinary team conducted a systematic review of quantitative and qualitative research on spiritual assessments, interventions, and outcomes in childhood cancer following PRISMA guidelines using a PROSPERO registered protocol. Thirty-nine well-designed studies were included in the final analysis.

Supporting Parent Caregivers of Children with Life-Limiting Illness.

The well-being of parents is essential to the well-being of children with life-limiting illness. Parents are vulnerable to a range of negative financial, physical, and psychosocial issues due to caregiving tasks and other stressors related to the illness of their child. Pediatric palliative care practitioners provide good care to children by supporting their parents in decision-making and difficult conversations, by managing pain and other symptoms in the ill child, and by addressing parent and family needs for care coordination, respite, bereavement, and social and emotional support.

Assessing the Needs of Parents of Children Diagnosed With Cancer in China: A Psychometric Study Developing a Needs Assessment Tool.

The psychosocial well-being of parents remains integral to the treatment and recovery of children diagnosed with cancer. However, limited research addresses the unique needs of this population. To better understand the supportive care needs of parents of children with cancer, this study tested the reliability and stability of the factorial structure of a revised version of the Cancer Patient Needs Questionnaire (rCPNQ) with Chinese parents of children who have cancer.

Advancing Hospice and Palliative Care Social Work Leadership in Interprofessional Education and Practice.

The importance of interprofessional collaboration in achieving high quality outcomes, improving patient quality of life, and decreasing costs has been growing significantly in health care. Palliative care has been viewed as an exemplary model of interprofessional care delivery, yet best practices in both interprofessional education (IPE) and interprofessional practice (IPP) in the field are still developing. So, too, is the leadership of hospice and palliative care social workers within IPE and IPP.

Social Work Assessment Notes: A Comprehensive Outcomes-Based Hospice Documentation System.

This article describes the development of an integrated psychosocial patient and caregiver assessment and plan of care for hospice social work documentation. A team of hospice social workers developed the Social Work Assessment Notes as a quality improvement project in collaboration with the information technology department. Using the Social Work Assessment Tool as an organizing framework, this comprehensive hospice social work documentation system is designed to integrate assessment, planning, and outcomes measurement.

Hanging by a thread: exploring the features of nonresponse in an online young adult cancer survivorship support community.

Purpose: Finding helpful information can be challenging for young adult (YA) cancer survivors; thus, it is critical to examine features of online posts that successfully solicit responses and assess how these differ from posts that do not solicit responses.

Methods: Using posts from an online YA cancer support community, we analyzed initial posts that did and did not receive replies utilizing Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC).

Results: Independent t tests revealed significant differences between the sets of posts regarding content, emotions, cognitive processes, pronoun use, and linguistic complexity.

Adolescents and young adults with life-threatening illness: special considerations, transitions in care, and the role of pediatric palliative care.

This article will cover the special considerations, challenges, and opportunities presented by caring for adolescents and young adults with life-threatening illnesses when the possibility of transition to an adult care setting arises.

The duty of the physician to care for the family in pediatric palliative care: context, communication, and caring.

Pediatric palliative care physicians have an ethical duty to care for the families of children with life-threatening conditions through their illness and bereavement. This duty is predicated on 2 important factors: (1) best interest of the child and (2) nonabandonment. Children exist in the context of a family and therefore excellent care for the child must include attention to the needs of the family, including siblings.

Understanding the lived experience of Latino adolescent and young adult survivors of childhood cancer.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the experience of surviving cancer for Latino adolescents and young adult (AYA) survivors of pediatric cancer.

Methods: Using a phenomenological approach, this study focused on the experience of cancer survivorship through in-depth interviews with 14 Latino AYA survivors (16-29 years) diagnosed as young children (0-15 years) and at least 1 year post-treatment

Results: Four essential themes about the Latino AYA experience as childhood cancer survivors emerged from analysis: borrowed strength of family and hospital staff; sustained positive attitude; perceived vulnerability; branded a cancer survivor. According to these participants, the lived experience of surviving cancer was predominately positive.

From the Euthanasia Society to physician orders for life-sustaining treatment: end-of-life care in the United States.

Advances in medical care and increasing prevalence of noncommunicable illnesses such as cardiovascular disease and cancer had raised concerns about respecting the patients' dying wishes as early as 1938, when the Euthanasia Society of America was formed. Many high-profile cases and landmark court decisions later, there are now several ways in which different states regulate the patients' end-of-life wishes. How these laws evolved, how seminal cases and medical and ethical advances helped shape the current state of end-of-life legislation, and how patients-especially those with cancer-began adopting various forms of advance directives will be the topic of this article.

The challenge of quality care for family caregivers in pediatric cancer care.

Objectives: To discuss the needs and potential interventions for parental caregivers of children with cancer.

Data Sources: Published articles between 2002 and 2012.

Conclusion: In general, parents do adjust and cope with their child's cancer, but a significant majority experience post-traumatic stress symptoms.

Control charts to identify adverse outcomes in elective colon resection.

Background: Control charts have been proposed for the measurement of quality in surgical care.

Methods: For each of 181 study hospitals in the 2005 National Inpatient Sample of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project database, an average moving range control chart for risk-adjusted postoperative length of stay (RApoLOS) was created for patients discharged alive after elective colectomy. RApoLOS outliers using upper control limits of 2.

Inefficiency as the major driver of excess costs in lung resection.

Background: Risk-adjusted outcomes of surgical care are important for quality and cost assessments. Although cardiac surgery is commonly studied, risk-adjusted analysis of excess costs of lung resection has not been pursued.

Methods: We used 2002 to 2005 National Inpatient Sample of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project data to evaluate adverse outcomes and costs in elective lung resections in hospitals with more than 20 cases during that period.

Disoriented grief: a lens through which to view the experience of Katrina evacuees.

Many studies on the impact of natural disasters have focused primarily on immediate stress reactions and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms rather than on evacuees' stories of grief and loss. Known categories of grief and loss do not fully capture the experiences of disaster survivors as evidenced by interviews of Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Austin, Texas. This article will describe their experiences through a resultant framework of Disoriented Grief.

Understanding health care professionals' views of family presence during pediatric resuscitation.

Objective: To examine the conflicting perceptions that health care professionals hold regarding family presence during pediatric resuscitation.

Methods: In phase 1, 137 health care professionals completed a 23-item questionnaire about their views on family presence and their perceptions of their opponents' views on family presence. In phase 2, 12 phase 1 respondents were interviewed about the effects that family presence may have on patients' families and on trauma teams.