Crossing disciplinary boundaries in end-of-life education.

There is a tremendous need to educate professional nurses and other health care providers in the care of the dying person. Both nurses and physicians have begun to recognize the need to cross traditional disciplinary boundaries to provide the complex care required during the last human transition. This article describes the evolution of a unique interdisciplinary graduate course on end-of-life issues at Wayne State University.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs: a framework for achieving human potential in hospice.

Although the widespread implementation of hospice in the United States has led to tremendous advances in the care of the dying, there has been no widely accepted psychological theory to drive needs assessment and intervention design for the patient and family. The humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow, especially his theory of motivation and the hierarchy of needs, has been widely applied in business and social science, but only sparsely discussed in the palliative care literature. In this article we review Maslow's original hierarchy, adapt it to hospice and palliative care, apply the adaptation to a case example, and then discuss its implications for patient care, education, and research.