Caring for People We Know: An Unrecognized Risk for Burnout?

As the field of palliative care continues to grow, many clinicians will care for patients with whom they have personal connections. Breaching the boundary between a clinician's personal and professional life is potentially an unrecognized risk for burnout. We explored the challenges of caring for patients personally known to clinicians and the types of support needed, with a view to developing preliminary practice guidelines.

Nurse-Led Motivational Interviewing for Setting Functional Cancer Pain Goals.

Purpose: Persons with advanced cancers experience high rates of pain. Nursing interventions for pain, which are tailored to the individual patient, may support motivation to engage in self-management and should include setting of realistic functional goals. For patients with advanced cancer, functional pain goals include personally important activities, measurable across clinical encounters.

Assessing the quality of pain care in ambulatory patients with advanced stage cancer.

Context: Pain is common among patients with advanced cancer despite the dissemination of clinical pain care guidelines.

Objectives: We sought to assess the quality of pain care among patients with advanced disease.

Methods: We reviewed the records of 85 adult ambulatory patients with advanced breast, lung, and gastrointestinal cancer treated in 2004-2006.

Type B lactic acidosis as a severe metabolic complication in lymphoma and leukemia: a case series from a single institution and literature review.

Type B lactic acidosis is a rare complication of hematologic malignancies. The exact mechanism of this process is not well understood. Because caregivers may not be aware of the association of type B lactic acidosis with hematologic malignancies, it may go unrecognized as a cause of acidosis in these patients.