Thirst and hydration in palliative care.

Palliative Care in Neonatal Intensive Care Units: Challenges and Solutions

Palliative care is a series of actions aiming to offer support to parents and their infants in order to improve their quality of life. Despite optimal outcomes, the provision of palliative care for infants and achieving these outcomes may be hardly feasible. The present study aimed to investigate the barriers to palliative care and gain insight into the solutions. Accordingly, the obstacles wer...

Medically assisted hydration for adult palliative care patients.

BACKGROUND Many palliative care patients have reduced oral intake during their illness. The management of this can include the provision of medically assisted hydration with the aim of prolonging the life of a patient, improving their quality of life, or both. This is an updated version of the original Cochrane review published in Issue 2, 2008, and updated in February 2011. OBJECTIVES To det...

Nurses’ Knowledge of Palliative Care and Its Related Factors

Introduction: Palliative care is the science of promoting the patient’s quality of life. It can improve the quality of life of a patient, which is effective not only in patient’s late-life but also useful in dealing with a chronic illness over many years. In this regard, nurses, as the largest providers of health care services, play an important role in palliative care. Objective: This study a...

Palliative care ethics: non-provision of artificial nutrition and hydration to terminally ill sedated patients.

Palliative care symposium: promoting joint palliative care.

Dr Lesley Colvin (Senior Lecturer in Anaesthesia, Western General Hospital, Edinburgh) discussed the challenges of pain management in patients with a history of addiction. Similar to other chronic conditions, substance misuse often follows a relapsing course. Pain is a frequently associated comorbidity. Mortality rates are high but can be reduced by successful methadone maintenance programmes, ...