Accompanying the Dying Patient: End of Life Care – Fran Hoh
- Crucial Conversations & Effective Techniques
- Compare Benefits of Palliative Care vs. Hospice Care
- Advance Directives: Legal Guidance for Decisions
- Ethical End of Life Challenges
- Tips to Keep Your Dying Patient Pain Free
- Cultural Considerations
- Quality of Life: The Latest in Symptom Management
There is a renewed focus in health care today on comfort care at the end of life. Research studies reveal that health professionals need to know more about the needs of dying persons regardless of setting: hospital, skilled nursing facility, home care or hospice.
This important topic is seldom taught in medical or nursing school, yet the death rate on our planet is 100%! How, then, is the most supportive end of life care learned today? The answer is through the knowledge and experiences shared by those who have been at the bedsides of dying patients. Your experienced clinician for this educational event, Fran Hoh, PhD, APN, CS, ACHPN, has mentored and educated many patients, family members and healthcare colleagues. She will provide you with concrete strategies to identify patients for whom aggressive therapy is not appropriate, tips to have conversations that address realistic and anticipated goals for care, and the latest when it comes to managing symptoms effectively, specifically pain.
Each end of life patient trusted to your care deserves your compassionate commitment to accompany them well on the final journey of their life.
- Analyze the current state of end of life care including symptom management in this country.
- Evaluate criteria for services and anticipated benefits of palliative care vs. hospice care.
- Apply appropriate communication techniques for families struggling with decisions at end of life.
- Explain equianalgesia, tolerance, and titration and how they impact the ability to effectively treat pain.
- Differentiate between medication options used to treat various types of pain.
- Examine specific interventions that enable the nurse to provide quality end of life care through symptom management.
- Create optimal patient outcomes through effective symptom management.
The Patient at End of Life
- Palliative care vs. hospice care
- Barriers to providing quality care at the end of life
- Research that addresses death and dying
Family Communication at End of Life
- Specific challenges addressed
- Assessing goals of care
- Communication strategies
- Interdisciplinary approach
- POLST/Advance directive documents
- Examples of crucial conversations
Providing Holistic Care at End of Life
- Cultural considerations
- Grief and loss
- Extent of symptoms
- Impact on family
- Type of disease and prior treatment success or failure
- Legal/Ethical Issues
Symptom Management at End of Life
- Pain
- Dyspnea
- Anorexia
- Fatigue
- Constipation
- Nausea/Vomiting
- Depression
- Anxiety
Patient Outcomes
- HCAHPS
- Press Ganey
- Nursing interventions that impact satisfaction scores
- Performance improvement strategies
- The Joint Commission Standards
- Using MDS in long term care to capture pain management
