Social determinants of health (SDOH) impacted the quality of home hospice care provided during the COVID-19 pandemic. Perspectives from professionals who provided care identify challenges and lessons learned from their experience. To examine hospice professionals' perspectives of how SDOH affected the delivery of high-quality home hospice care in New York City (NYC) during the COVID-19 pandemic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContext: The critical role of hospice and palliative care in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is well recognized, but there is limited evidence to guide healthcare leadership through future crises.
Objectives: Our goal was to support future organizational resilience by exploring hospice and palliative team members' perspectives on crisis leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City (NYC).
Methods: This qualitative descriptive study used individual, semi-structured interviews of purposively sampled interdisciplinary team members.
Background And Objectives: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic severely disrupted hospice care, yet there is little research regarding how widespread disruptions affected clinician and family decision-making. We aimed to understand how the pandemic affected structures, processes, and outcomes of end-of-life care.
Research Design And Methods: Retrospective narrative chart review of electronic health records of 61 patients referred and admitted to hospice from 3 New York City geriatrics practices who died between March 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021.
Background: Aortic Stenosis (AS) is a common syndrome in older adults wherein the narrowing of the aortic valve impedes blood flow, resulting in advanced heart failure. AS is associated with a high mortality rate (50 % at 6 months if left untreated), substantial symptom burden, and reduced quality of life. Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) was approved in 2012 as a less invasive alternative to surgical valve repair, offering a treatment for older frail patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe purpose of this article was to analyze the concept of "the fighter in the intensive care unit (ICU)" per the scientific literature and the impact this mentality has on care administered in the ICU. A literature review and a concept analysis based on Rodger's evolutionary method were performed to identify surrogate terms, antecedents, attributes, and consequences pertaining to the "fighter" in the ICU. Thirteen articles with a focus on "the fighter" were included in this analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCystic fibrosis (CF) is a progressive genetic disease characterized by multisystem symptom burden. Specialist palliative care (PC), as a model of care, has been shown to be effective in improving quality of life and reducing symptom burden in other conditions, but has not been tested in CF. To develop and test the feasibility and acceptability of a specialist PC intervention embedded within an outpatient CF clinic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Heart failure is characterized by physical and emotional symptoms and decreased quality of life (QoL). Palliative care can reduce burdens of serious illness but often is limited to inpatient or academic settings.
Objectives: To develop and test the Primary Education for Nurses in Palliative care-HF (PENPal-HF) intervention, training outpatient cardiology nurses to address symptom burden, patient priorities for care and QoL, and advance care planning as part of quarterly HF visits.
Background: Hospice care was initially designed for seriously ill individuals with cancer. Thus, the model and clinicians were geared toward caring for this population. Despite the proportion of persons living with dementia (PLWD) receiving hospice care substantially increased over the past 10 years, and their longer lengths of stay, established hospice interventions for this population are scarce.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The per diem financial structure of hospice care may lead agencies to consider patient-level factors when weighing admissions.
Objective: To investigate if treatment cost, disease complexity, and diagnosis are associated with hospice willingness to accept patients.
Design: In this 2019 online survey study, individuals involved in hospice admissions decisions were randomized to view one of six hypothetical patient vignettes: "high-cost, high-complexity," "low-cost, high-complexity," and "low-cost, low-complexity" within two diseases: heart failure and cystic fibrosis.
Background/objectives: Advance care planning (ACP) traditionally involves asking individuals about their treatment preferences during a brief period of incapacity near the end of life. Because dementia leads to prolonged incapacity, with many decisions arising before a terminal event, it has been suggested that dementia-specific ACP is necessary. We sought to elicit the perspectives of older adults with early cognitive impairment and their caregivers on traditional and dementia-specific ACP.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Physical and emotional burdens impair quality of life (QoL) in many adults with cystic fibrosis (CF). Palliative care (PC) improves QoL in other serious illnesses, yet the full array of palliative needs amenable to PC are unknown in CF.
Methods: We surveyed 164 adults with CF using the Supportive Care Needs Survey 34 (SCNS-34) to assess unmet PC needs across five domains, the Edmonton Symptom Assessment System (ESAS) to assess symptom burden, and the Cystic Fibrosis Questionnaire-Revised (CFQ-R) to assess CF-specific QoL.
Context: Patients living with cystic fibrosis (CF) report impaired quality of life. Little is known about unmet supportive care needs among adults living with CF and how they are associated with demographic characteristics.
Objectives: The primary objective of this study was to identify associations between demographic variables and unmet supportive care needs regarding anxiety, sadness, pain and uncertainty about the future of living with CF.
Although patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) experience many symptoms and impaired quality of life, little is known about existential distress. This multivariable logistic regression evaluated the relationship between symptom burden and five existential needs representing existential distress in 164 adults with CF. Eleven percent of participants reported no symptom burden, 61% mild burden, and 28% moderate/severe burden.
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