Main description:

Rooted in everyday hospital medicine, Palliative Skills for Frontline Clinicians addresses the challenges of delivering complex care to patients living with serious illnesses. Spanning emergency medicine, internal medicine, surgery and various subspecialties, each chapter reads like a story, comparing usual care with a step-by-step palliative-based approach.

This case-based book features a multidisciplinary, palliative-trained authorship, including neurologists, nephrologists, emergency physicians, surgeons, intensivists, and obstetricians. Divided into four parts, Palliative Skills for Frontline Clinicians outlines common clinical scenarios across settings and specialties to highlight unmet needs of patients with potentially terminal illnesses. Each case is broken down into the usual standard approach, and delves into detail regarding different palliative interventions that can be appropriate in those scenarios. These are meant to be practice changing; down to the actual words used to communicate with patients. In addition to the book's focus on the principles of palliative care and the "art" of treating the patient, approaches to communication with the patient's families for the best long-term outcomes are discussed.

Concise and pragmatic, Palliative Skills for Frontline Clinicians is meant to be practice changing. It provides readers with both a new conceptual framework, as well as actual words to communicate with patients and medication doses for symptom management. It is an invaluable resource for non-palliative trained clinicians who wish to strengthen their palliative care skills.

Contents:

1. Hospital World

A. Emergency Department

i. The Mundane

ii. The Game-changer

iii. The Frequent flier

iv. The Extreme

B. Surgery and Trauma

i. Sudden accident/death

ii. Geriatric

iii. Traumatic Brain Injury

iv. Hip Fracture TBA

C. Intensive Care Unit

i. Withdrawal of life support

ii. TBA

D. Internal Medicine - general inpatient

i. Unable to swallow

ii. Get the DNR

iii. Family conflict - I don't care what her advanced directive says!

iv. Don't tell him that he has cancer

E. Outpatient World - Specialists and subspecialists

A. Cardiology

i. 1-2 cases

B. Neurology

i. 1-2 cases

C. Oncology

i. 1-2 cases

D. Pulmonary

i. 1-2 cases

E. Renal/GI

i. 1-2 cases

F. Pediatrics

i. 1-2 cases

3. Special circumstances

A. Pediatric Emergency Medicine/Trauma

B. Guardianship

C. Pain Management

D. Persistent Vegetative State

E. Substance abuse