Existential experiences often come to the fore in the case of a severe and/or life-threatening disease and in old age. This can evoke a variety of thoughts and emotions. The existential dimension is a concept that encompasses spiritual, religious and secular perspectives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF'Existential' can be seen as a broad term for issues surrounding people's experiences and way of thinking about life. This study examined availability of existential care and found that many different staff categories performed existential care. Existential care is associated with conversations and experienced as both easy and difficult; several factors were cited, e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCommunication about life-threatening disease and palliative care is essential but often experienced as difficult by those concerned and has mainly been studied in terms of its verbal components. Despite the fundamentality of nonverbal communication, its dimensions in care, especially in the communication by patients and their significant others, has not been as extensively examined. Drawing on a secondary qualitative content analysis of data from 23 interviews-15 with patients in specialized palliative home care in Sweden and 8 with their significant others-this study aims at understanding and characterizing how patients verbally express experiences of conveying nonverbal cues about life-threatening disease and its consequences and how their significant others express perceiving these cues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Existential/spiritual questions often arise when a person suffers from a serious and/or life-threatening illness. "Existential" can be seen as a broad inclusive term for issues surrounding people's experience and way of thinking about life. To be able to meet patients' existential needs, knowledge is needed about what the existential dimension includes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPalliat Support Care
December 2022
Objective: End-of-life dreams and visions (ELDVs) have been suggested to be prevalent psychic phenomena near death that can provide meaning and comfort for the dying. There is a lack of studies from the secular Nordic countries. The aim of this study was to determine whether palliative care professionals in a Nordic country have experience of patients expressing dreams, visions, and/or inner experiences and, if so, how they are perceived.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough communication is strongly emphasized in palliative care, not much research has focused on communication between patients and their loved ones. The purpose was to increase understanding of communication around severe illness between patients with a life-threatening disease, receiving palliative care, and their loved ones. Secondary intention was to identify strategies making easier for patients to talk about their condition with loved ones.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: To investigate the experiential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on patients with non-COVID, life-threatening disease and their family carers.
Design: An interpretative qualitative design informed by phenomenological hermeneutics and based on data from in-depth interviews, performed between June and September 2020.
Setting: Patients receiving specialised palliative home care and their family carers living in Sweden.
Am J Hosp Palliat Care
January 2023
: Metaphors are used by patients and professionals in the discourse of disease and can facilitate conversations about difficult topics. There is little information about metaphors present in patients' end-of-life dreams. : Identify and interpret metaphors in end-of-life dreams, directly reported by patients in palliative care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Patients with life-threatening diseases have reportedly end-of-life experiences that are perceived positively. Loved ones and healthcare personnel may mistakenly interpret the phenomena as confusion and patients can be reluctant to talk about it due to fear of ridicule. Studies addressing patients directly are scarce and there is a lack of studies from highly secular countries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Chronic diseases have an impact on and change patient's lives which means that they need to find ways to cope with the new situation. The aim was to describe how the chronic disease has influenced patients' views of their life situation.
Methods: The study was quantitative in design with data collected using a semi-structured questionnaire.
Background: Timely identification of patients with palliative care needs is a prerequisite for being able to carry out effective and equal palliative care. The Supportive and Palliative Care Indicators Tool (SPICT) identifies patients likely to benefit from a palliative approach.
Aim: The main objective was to describe the translation, cross-cultural adaptation and content validation process of the SPICT-SE.
Background: Chronic diseases have an impact on and can change the lives of the persons affected by them. This study examines how a disease can influence patients' daily lives, the strategies they adopt to cope, and their experiences of support. The study focuses on four chronic diseases: asthma-allergy, cancer, diabetes mellitus, and inflammatory rheumatic arthritis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The aim of this study was to investigate the awareness of palliative care (PC) in a general Swedish population.
Design: We developed an e-survey based on a similar study conducted in Northern Ireland, consisting of 10 questions. Closed questions were primarily analyzed using descriptive statistics.
A prominent existential concept is that elderly parents should naturally become severely ill or die before a younger person does. If the reverse should happen, it may influence the parent's existential view of life. The aim of this study was to investigate the existential issues during illness time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Palliative carers constantly face ethical problems. There is lack of organised support for the carers to handle these ethical problems in a consistent way. Within organisational ethics, we find models for moral deliberation and for developing organisational culture; however, they are not combined in a structured way to support carers' everyday work.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: urinary incontinence (UI) is a common symptom among older people, with a higher prevalence among frail older persons living in nursing homes. Despite consequences such as reduced health and quality of life, many older people do not seek help for their symptoms, resulting in missed opportunity for treatment.
Objective: the aim of this study was to investigate the evidence and the effect of conservative treatment of UI and the quality of life among older and frail older persons.
Aim: The prevalence and severity of urinary incontinence (UI) increase with age and comorbidity. The benefits of pharmacotherapy for UI in the elderly are questionable. The aim of the present study was to systematically review the efficacy of pharmacological treatment for UI in the elderly and frail elderly.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Loved ones of a patient with an incurable disease will accompany the patient to the end of life. Health care professionals must discuss difficult matters with loved ones and be sure that they really understand the seriousness of the patient's disease. The study explore how the professionals do when they explore the grounds on which they make their assessment of loved ones' insight into a patient's fatal disease.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The aim of the study was to explore the skills and strategies employed by professionals when having difficult conversations to provide information to loved ones as part of palliative care.
Method: A qualitative design was chosen with in-depth interviews with nurses, assistant nurses and doctors a Hospital in Sweden and were analysed using content analysis.
Results: The interviews produced examples of strategies used by professionals when imparting difficult information to patient and loved ones.
Objective: The aim was to explore how erectile dysfunction (ED) correlates with increasing age and a number of demographic, physical and lifestyle factors.
Material And Methods: A questionnaire was sent to a random sample (10,458) of men living in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1992. The men were from the age cohorts 45, 50, 55 years, etc.
The aim of this study was to investigate the opinions of nurses, assistant nurses, and doctors about whether the patient's loved ones understand that the patient has a life-limiting disease, and if they talk about these matters with the patient or staff. The study was quantitative in design with data collected by means of a semi-structured questionnaire. The study was conducted at geriatric, oncology, and urology wards at a university hospital in western Sweden.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: When a patient receives the diagnosis of an incurable cancer, their loved ones have to face the fact that life will change. Realizing that the time together is with someone who is going to die, loved ones have to cope with the situation.
Objective: The objective of this study was to increase the knowledge concerning what forms of coping strategies loved ones apply when a family member is faced with an incurable cancer.
Background: Lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) such as urinary incontinence (UI) and overactive bladder (OAB) are highly prevalent conditions, but there are few studies describing progression and remission of LUTS in men, especially over the long term.
Objective: To describe the prevalence of UI, OAB, and LUTS using current International Continence Society definitions in the same men studied longitudinally over time.
Design: Prospective, population-based, longitudinal study.