Palliative care and ethics /
edited by Timothy E. Quill and Franklin G. Miller.
- 1 online resource (322 p.)
Description based upon print version of record.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Palliative Care and Ethics; Copyright; CONTENTS; CONTRIBUTORS; SECTION I: Introduction and Overview; 1. Introduction; 2. Hospice; 3. Palliative Care; SECTION II: Ethical Challenges within Current Systems of Care; 4. Emerging Complexities in Pediatric Palliative Care; 5. Patient-Centered Ethos in an Era of Cost Control: Palliative Care and Healthcare Reform; 6. Palliative Care, Ethics, and Interprofessional Teams; SECTION III: Addressing Dimensions of Suffering; 7. Pain Relief and Palliative Care; 8. Management of Dyspnea; 9. Diagnosis and Treatment of Delirium 10. Psychosocial and Psychiatric Suffering11. Capacity and Shared Decision Making in Serious Illness; SECTION IV: Difficult Decisions Near the Very End of Life; 12. Withholding and Withdrawing Life-Sustaining Treatments; 13. Medical Futility: Content in the Context of Care; 14. Palliative Sedation; 15. Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking; 16. Physician-Assisted Death; 17A. Lessons from Legalized Physician-Assisted Death in Oregon and Washington; 17B. Physician-Assisted Death in Western Europe: The Legal and Empirical Situation; Index
Hospice is the premiere end of life program in the United States, but its requirement that patients forgo disease-directed therapies and that they have a prognosis of 6 months or less means that it serves less than half of dying patients and often for very short periods of time. Palliative care offers careful attention to pain and symptom management, added support for patients and families, and assistance with difficult medical decision making alongside any and all desired medical treatments, but it does not include a comprehensive system of care as is provided by hospice. The practice of pall