Palliative Pharmacy Care

Palliative care is primarily directed at providing relief to a terminally-ill person through symptom and pain management. The goal is not to cure, but to provide comfort and maintain the highest possible quality of life for as long as life remains. The focus is not on death, but on compassionate specialized care for the living. Palliative care functions best within an interdisciplinary team model that includes pharmacists playing a vital role in improving therapy compliance and outcomes.Pharmacists are practicing palliative care in a number of settings that include hospice, home care, out-patient treatment centers and hospitals. Palliative care often follows as a parallel track to the therapy for the disease. Palliative Pharmacy Care serves both as an aid to practitioners and a teaching text. Each chapter contains at least one case study with questions, key points, and clinical pearls. Inside you’ll find: A solid foundation for the history and principles of the area of practice as well as more advanced sections on specific treatment issues such as cancer and pediatrics. Symptom-management overviews for specific diseases and general health problems related to terminal illness such as anxiety, fatigue, and constipation. Pain management guidelines on topics such pathophysiology and pharmacology, nociceptive pain, neuropathic pain, equianalgesic dosing/opioid rotation, secretion management, and "death rattle." A discussion on the future of pharmacists in palliative care, setting up palliative care services and other general issues and concerns for pharmacists providing this service. And much more.

Palliative Pharmacy Care serves both as an aid to practitioners and a teaching text. Each chapter contains at least one case study with questions, key points, and clinical pearls. Pharmacists are practicing palliative care in a number of settings that include hospice, home care, out-patient treatment centers and hospitals. Palliative care often follows as a parallel track to the therapy for the disease.

The seventh edition of the Palliative Care Formulary (PCF), a Pharmaceutical Press product from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, is an essential resource for healthcare professionals who care for patients with progressive end-stage disease. Although written primarily with cancer patients in mind, PCF7 contains specific material relating to several other life-limiting diseases e.g. COPD, congestive heart failure, renal and hepatic failure, and Parkinson's disease. PCF7 also includes several Quick Clinical Guides covering key topics in palliative care and designed for everyday use. Grounded in clinical practice, this comprehensive title includes independent information about drugs used in palliative care, highlighting off-label indications or routes, and dealing with the administration of multiple drugs by continuous subcutaneous infusion. Features: - Two new monographs to reflect increasing use in practice, Denosumab and Parecoxib - Hepatic chapter fully revised by a multidisciplinary working group - Cannabinoids monograph fully updated and including the 2019 NICE guidance - Anticoagulants monograph fully updated to include a brand new table with prescribing guidance for Direct Oral Anticoagulants (DOACs) - Opioid antagonists outside the CNS fully reviewed to reflect the latest products and evidence for use - Urinary antimuscarinics, a new combined monograph to reflect the increasing use of other drugs in this category From the reviews of previous editions 'PCF [is] a core text for the speciality and has no serious rivals.' Palliative Medicine 'The information is up to date and prepared with extreme care. This handbook should be available to staff involved with inpatient consultation, inpatient units of care and home visits.' Journal of Pain and Symptom Management 'First class. Highly recommended.' International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care

This is a practical, easily accessible A-Z of the common drugs encountered in palliative care.

The growing geriatric population in the United States has created an increasing need for palliative medicine services across the range of medical and surgical specialties. Yet, palliative medicine lacks the resources to carry such a workload itself. Geriatric Palliative Care addresses this need by encouraging individual specialties to "own" the management of elderly with the same vigor as they "own" other key management competencies within their specialty. This clinically focused and highly practical handbook, which compliments the more comprehensive text Geriatric Palliative Care by Sean Morrison and Diane Meier (Oxford University Press, 2003), encourages this process of learning and ownership across many medical specialties. Designed to be readable and easily accessible to a range of health care providers, Geriatric Palliative Care outlines specific strategies for caring for specific palliative care issues common in elderly patients. The handbook also provides evidence based advice for helping patients, relatives, and staff cope with such issues as polypharmacy, dementia and consent, multiple pathologies, home care, elderly caregivers, and supporting the elderly in the place where they would like to be.

While palliative care has adopted a holistic approach to treatment, medication driven symptom management ostensibly forms the critical aspect of care. Prescribing in palliative care can be extremely complex because the patient may often have comorbidity, or occasionally multimorbidity. The associated polypharmacy further complicates the pharmacological management of symptoms being caused by the palliative condition. This can be daunting for healthcare professionals and can negatively impact upon the effectiveness of care provided. Fully revised and updated, the third edition of Drugs in Palliative Care provides an accessible and succinct overview of the main drugs that are encountered in palliative care clinical practice. The text begins by providing a clinical pharmacology overview and prescribing guidance, then contains over 160 monographs of palliative care drugs, in an easy to access A-Z format.

The Oxford Textbook of Palliative Social Work is a comprehensive, evidence-informed text that addresses the needs of professionals who provide interdisciplinary, culturally sensitive, biopsychosocial-spiritual care for patients and families living with life-threatening illness. Social workers from diverse settings will benefit from its international scope and wealth of patient and family narratives. Unique to this scholarly text is its emphasis on the collaborative nature inherent in palliative care. This definitive resource is edited by two leading palliative social work pioneers who bring together an array of international authors who provide clinicians, researchers, policy-makers, and academics with a broad range of content to enrich the guidelines recommended by the National Consensus Project for Quality Palliative Care.