Comment: The journey of home care
Mary Baines
pp 57-57
The early hospices in the UK were purely for inpatients, and those who were admitted were grateful that they could stay there until they died. This was the situation at St Christopher’s Hospice for the first two years of its existence.
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Predicting survival in advanced cancer patients
Samantha Lund and Paddy Stone
pp 58-61
Prognostic information is frequently requested by patients with advanced cancer, as knowing how long they have left to live can help patients focus on issues of preparation. Healthcare professionals’ estimates of prognosis are, however, often inaccurate.
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Supporting hospice staff: the introduction of Schwartz Center Rounds to a UK hospice setting
Anjali Mullick, Abigail Wright, Jenny Watmore-Eve and Mary Flatley
pp 62-65
St Joseph’s Hospice in East London is the first UK hospice to introduce Schwartz Center Rounds for staff. These are intended to support staff in delivering compassionate patient care.
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Book review: Supportive Care in Respiratory Disease, 2nd edn
Anne-Louise Jennings
pp 65-65
This is an exciting book for anyone with an interest in the supportive care of respiratory symptoms/disease, which contains excellent material from respected authors in this area. For professionals in the respiratory field, it covers the essentials of palliative care and for palliative care specialists, it covers the respiratory field in some depth.
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Case study masterclass 67: Suspected opioid addiction in a woman with gastrointestinal stromal tumour
Anthony Gubbay
pp 66-67
Caroline is a 20-year-old single female with a ‘wild’ metastatic gastrointestinal stromal tumour diagnosed in late 1999. Initial treatment involved chemotherapy with imatinib. Despite failing to demonstrate a dramatic response, it did stabilise the disease.
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Case study masterclass 66 answers: Managing an elderly cancer patient with percutaneous nephrostomy
Ramesh Thulavavenkateswaran and Ananda Kumar Dhanasekaran
pp 68-68
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After-hours telephone triage: a palliative care support service in Australia
Charlotte Chidell and Ian Hatton
pp 69-71
All community palliative care services in the state of Victoria, Australia, have been required to provide access to after-hours palliative care support since 1997. The Caritas Christi Hospice in Kew is part of St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne. The hospice provides an after-hours telephone triage service to clients (individual patients in community palliative care services) and their families in three community palliative care services within Victoria.
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Book review: Communication in Palliative Care
Claire Bates
pp 71-71
The bulk of this practical and readable guide is dedicated to chapters on assessment skills, diagnosis, treatment, the impact of serious illness, confirmation of a poor prognosis, key ethical issues, breaking bad news and the dying phase.
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Developing respite care at an inner London hospice
Diane Laverty, Sara Faithfull and Anne Arber
pp 72-76
In the UK, palliative care plays an important role in supporting patients and their carers during the course of a progressive and life-threatening illness. There has been much research into people’s preferred place of care and death, the future care needs of an aging society and the lack of resources and services in the community to support people’s wishes.
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Cognitive function: to measure or not to measure – is this a question?
Mike Tapley, Charlotte Talbot and David Jolley
pp 78-81
There are many arguments for making sure that cognitive impairment is identified among hospice patients. According to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence guideline on delirium, this should be done with the help of a validated scale.
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Book review: A Public Health Perspective on End of Life Care
Chris Farnham
pp 81-81
This book is the first of its kind in that it takes a unique look at the effect death has on modern society. In highlighting the inherent link between palliative and end-of-life care and public health, it starts the ball rolling, identifying a wide range of areas of palliative care that carry a public health message.
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An approach to educating children about death
Marie-Ange Abras
pp 82-84
Since 1993, I have been talking about death and bereavement with children in French schools. As a researcher in palliative care, I focus on how children aged between six and 12 see death.
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Core competencies in palliative care: an EAPC White Paper on palliative care education – part 1
Claudia Gamondi, Philip Larkin and Sheila Payne
pp 86-91
This White Paper follows on from a number of documents previously published by the European Association for Palliative Care that have addressed the issue of education and training for palliative care health professionals. It is widely recognised that palliative care is applicable across a range of healthcare settings, from tertiary hospitals to primary care. All healthcare professionals and workers should be able to provide appropriate palliative care and thus need to be trained.
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Hospice and palliative care in Poland – current challenges and solutions
Esther Schmidlin
pp 92-94
Poland has a long-standing tradition of hospice care. Last year, the first Polish hospices were able to celebrate their 30th anniversary.1When I visited the country for football reasons (Poland hosted, with the Ukraine, the Euro 2012 tournament), I took the opportunity to visit two hospices.
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A day in the life of … Charlotte Chidell, Hospice After-hours Coordinator
Charlotte Chidell
pp 96-98
My scheduled shift starts at 3 pm and my route to work is across a number of suburbs in Melbourne’s east, so I need to leave home promptly by 2.15 pm. The timing coincides with the end of school, so the roads are busy with schoolchildren, trams, bicycles, school buses and cars.
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European insight: Hospiz Österreich: advancing end-of-life care in Austria
Leena Pelttari and Anna H Pissarek
pp 100-102
When Hildegard Teuschl – a pioneer of palliative care in Austria – founded Hospiz Österreich (Hospice Austria) in 1993 as the national organisation of Austrian hospice and palliative care institutions, only some of the country’s federal states had hospice services, created by a few enthusiasts, professionals and volunteers. Twenty years on, Hospice Austria has around 260 member institutions and the country has, to a large extent, implemented the concept of graded hospice and palliative care.
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