Week 34 Flashcards
What is palliative care?
“the active holistic care of individuals across all ages with serious health-related suffering due to severe illness, and especially of those near the end-of-life. It aims to improve the quality of life of patients, their families and their caregivers”
The elimination of serious health-related suffering includes the various health conditions or severe illness that are most likely to generate a need for palliative care
Health-related suffering is considered serious when it compromises physical, social, spiritual, and/or emotional functioning.
Define Total suffering
“experienced by persons, not merely by bodies, and has its source in challenges that threaten the intactness of the person as a complex social and psychologic entity”
Suffering is an unpleasant or even anguishing experience which can severely affect a person on a psychophysical and even existential level.
What are the Goals and aims of palliative care
The goal of palliative care is to prevent and relieve suffering, and to support the best possible quality of life for patients and their families, regardless of the stage of the disease or the need for other therapies
For example: cancer, heart and lung disease, dementia, renal failure, degenerative neurological conditions
Aims to neither hasten nor to postpone death
Aims to provide relief from distressing symptoms
Taha Wairua
(Spiritual) Knowing the things that give us meaning. For some, it’s about religious faith, or a spiritual connection to the universe and ancestors. But it can also be about learning to celebrate our own story: who we are, what we believe, where we belong and where we’re going.
Taha Tinana
(Physical well-being): How our body feels, moves and heals, and how we care for it. Nourishing and strengthening our physical wellbeing helps us cope with the ups and downs and life
Taha Whānau
(Family and social well-being): Our family and friends, the people we share our life with, and who make us feel like we belong
Taha Hinengaro
(Mental and emotional well-being): Our thoughts and
feelings from our mind, heart and conscience. How we think, feel and communicate. Our mind and body are inseparable.
Whats Primary palliative care
Should be integral to all kinds of care for people with advanced diseases.
Whats Specialised palliative care
Specialty teams available to offer advice about care
What are the 5 stages of dying
Disease relentless, change underway, recovery less likely, dying begins, actively dying
When is end of life
When they are likely to die within the next 12 months
Who are some of the other health care professionals who support clients in hospice?
- General Partitioner, practice nurses
- Medical Specialists, wider specialist team members
- Physiotherapist
- Occupational therapist
Volunteers
Māori/Pasifika support workers, local Iwi, other cultural advisors/support peoples
What are some of our societal beliefs about death and dying?
- Modern medicine can/should be able to fix this
- Death is failure and someone must be accountable
- Death can always be “peaceful” (the sanitised vision of dying)
- If we don’t talk of death then it won’t happen
- Grief is pathological and has a “cure”
How would you describe the services provided by hospice to a client and their whānau?
Hospice care focuses on the care, comfort, and quality of life of a person with a serious illness who is approaching the end of life
What are common symptoms in the palliative phase of illness
Pain, Constipation, Dyspnoea, Nausea and vomiting, Delirium,
