The Hospice Handbook

Discover the Importance of GentleEnd-of-Life Care for Your Loved Ones Well-informed patients and families have better hospice care experiences. But most people don't learn about hospice until they feel they have no other choice.Delaying that education means it's often too late to take advantage of the many benefits hospice care can offer. With The Hospice Handbook, Nurse Debbie wants to change all that. By empowering patients, families, and other caregivers with the tools they need to navigate the complicated world of hospice care, she hopes to improve hospice patients' quality of life dramatically.Employing her trademark love, compassion, and folksy humor, which comes from her own dear father, Pappy, who inspired her to open Serenity First HospiceCare in Richmond, VirginIa, Nurse Debbie provides invaluable advice and crucial facts about the many facets of hospice, including interviews with vital members of the hospice care team. Through this thoughtful guide, Nurse Debbie hopes you'll discover that the challenging road you're walking can not only be faced with confidence and comfort but also filled with many meaningful opportunities to celebrate life and love to the very end.

In recent years hospice care has gone from a little-known medical alternative to a major movement in health care. By emphasizing palliative care and pain management rather than curative treatment, hospices allow the terminally ill to spend the last days, week, or months of their lives in their own homes, cared for by their families under the supervision of a team of specially trained hospice workers that includes doctors, nurses, social workers, and volunteers. The Hospice Handbook assures us that the terminally ill do have options, and the quality of their lives can still be within their control.

This practical guide briefly covers the historical and epidemiological background of palliative care and the growth of palliative medicine as a specialty, before dealing with major physical, psychological, spiritual, and symptom management issues from diagnosis to bereavement care.

This handbook offers a practical, thorough approach to the clinical practice of palliative care. Adding North American authors to its roster of UK contributors, the third edition of this award-winning book addresses important changes in the evidence base of palliative care, as well as an emphasis on end-of-life community-based care. It features new chapters on dementia and advance care planning, a simplified lymphoedema discussion, and an ongoing commitment to providing essential guidance for physicians, nurses, and all primary care providers involved in palliative care in hospital, hospice, and community settings.

This comprehensive pocket-size handbook is the essential reference for clinicians and others serving patients with advanced or life-limiting illness. It offers up-to-date, relevant, and highly practical guidance to expertly meet the challenges of serving these patients and their families. This user-friendly manual emphasizes the importance of honoring patients' wishes throughout their medical journey while meeting their whole-person, often complex needs-from symptom management to attending to spiritual and emotional suffering-and always acknowledges the context of patients' lives, including the needs of loved ones supporting them. The layout makes finding information quick and easy, with alphabetically organized chapter headings and a detailed index. Organ-system-based chapters offer disease-specific, goals-of-care discussion guidance and reviews of etiology, signs and symptoms, assessment, and management-including standard treatment as well as palliative options. Other chapters cover communication with patients and families, consultation with colleagues, and code status discussions, along with valuable subjects such as withdrawing life support, ethics, spirituality, physician-assisted death, and palliative options of last resort. Readers will find practical management strategies for symptoms such as pain, nausea, dyspnea, and delirium. In addition, chapters on opioid use and dosing, and pharmacology of commonly used palliative medications, make this guide an invaluable resource.

This is the only handbook for hospice and palliative care professionals looking to enhance their care delivery or their programs with LGBTQ-inclusive care. Anchored in the evidence, extensively referenced, and written in clear, easy-to-understand language, LGBTQ-Inclusive Hospice and Palliative Care provides clear, actionable strategies for hospice and palliative physicians, nurses, social workers, counselors, and chaplains.

The Oxford American Handbook of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and Supportive Care is an easily-navigable source of information about the day-to-day management of patients requiring palliative and hospice care. The table of contents follows the core curriculum of the American Board of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, thus meeting the educational and clinical information needs of students, residents, fellows, and nurse practitioners. Succinct, evidence-based, topically-focused content is supplemented by extensive tables, algorithms, and clinical pearls. This edition includes new sections on grief and bereavement, medical marijuana, and physician assisted suicide, and has been updated throughout to incorporate National Consensus Project for Quality Palliative Care Clinical Practice Guidelines.