Anticipatory grief during COVID-19: a commentary

Mental health support, palliative and psychiatric care and similar strategies should be taken into account when planning and allocating resources during the COVID-19 pandemic, recognising the impact...

Reflecting on caring and death anxiety during the pandemic

It is important to make the point that death is the extinction of life. Therefore, we can say that, inevitably, death is a primordial and primary source of anxiety experienced when we care, as most...

Assuring good deaths at home

‘It is to be hoped that “building back better” following the pandemic will include strategies to reduce social isolation, especially among the vulnerable and those at the end of their lives.’ .

Achieving equity of access to palliative care

While this column is written for UK community nurses, issues of inequity are a global problem (Reimer-Kirkham et al, 2016; Hunt et al, 2019); therefore, we should look for a global solution, working...

Back to basics: communication in palliative care

The skill of maintaining silence with patients involves the use of purposeful silent periods to enable the patient to divulge more information about their emotional state. Although these periods of...

Focus on the patient: applying the essentials of palliative care

With so many demands and challenges encountered, it is probably easy to forget why we provide palliative and end-of-life care. A timely reminder was offered to always start by focusing on the patient....

Stoma-related considerations in palliative patients

A stoma is formed to divert either urine or faeces out of the body. A common reason for stoma formation is colorectal cancer and inflammatory bowel disease (Burch and Black, 2017). The most common...

Are we getting it right? A review of end-of-life care in community nursing

Patient records were evaluated using a questionnaire to understand how well the service performed against a set of care priorities, namely:.

The known unknowns of assisted hydration at the end of life

Another factor contributing to the widespread variability in practice is the uncertainty about its impact. A recent systematic review of 15 studies found insufficient evidence to draw conclusions...

What's in a name?

End-of-life care: perspective of a relative rather than a professional

The call came at midnight on Good Friday 2020: my relative, anonymised to Jim, experienced a sudden acute event and called 999 and then me, as the family nurse. I arrived to find an ambulance crew...

Carer and staff perceptions of end-of-life care provision: case of a hospice-at-home service

The evaluation was carried out between July and December 2016, using a mixed-methods approach (Creswell and Creswell, 2018). This paper presents the qualitative findings from family carer and staff...