Faecal incontinence in palliative and end-of-life care

In 2018, NHS England published a document aimed at commissioners and discusses continence. The publication recognises that continence is an important component in a person's health and wellbeing at...

The many challenges of living with prostate cancer

Deprescribing in end-of-life care

Awareness of the anatomical changes that occur during the end stages of life is fundamental to support the rationale for stopping medications (Mangoni and Jackson, 2003). When a disease progresses,...

Death as the final phase of development

Caring as a source of death anxiety in palliative care

Ideally, society at large needs to shift its view of death and accept it as natural part of life, with children becoming involved with dying and the funeral rituals of close relations. This shift...

Supporting the bereaved in palliative care

Providing support for the bereaved can include some of the following:.

When words make a difference in palliative care

When talking to patients, any pity response from the health professional (HCP) tends to convey a negative message, that the patient is not being listened to and, with that, they are not reassured...

Getting anticipatory prescribing right in end-of-life care

The Department of Health and Social Care (2012) developed ‘Vision and strategy: an approach to district nursing’, building upon the six Cs (care, compassion, competence, communication, courage and...

Barriers and facilitators to implementing the Carer Support Needs Assessment Tool in a community palliative care setting

The Carer Support Needs Assessment Tool (CSNAT) assesses the support needs of informal carers of people with a terminal illness (Ewing and Grande, 2013). This is a 14-item tool that assesses (a)...

Affording patients their dying wish at the end of life

The purpose of dying wishes can be multifactorial, from personal to including others, mainly those deemed important to the dying person. The request for a dying wish signifies that the patient is...

Paradoxes of death and dying

Caring for dying patients presents a range of challenges, from symptom control and management and effective communication to managing the patient's psychological concerns, which may make community...

Are district nurses well placed to provide equitable end-of-life care to individuals who are homeless?

A PICO question was implemented to develop the question for this literature review (see Table 1). Once the focus question was identified, inclusion and exclusion criteria were set to enable a focused...