Paper
Monday, November 5, 2007
366
Complementary Therapies and Palliative Care: Education and Screening
Jennifer L. Reich, MA, MS, APRN, BC, College of Nursing, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA, Susan Berenson, MSN, CNS, OCN, Integrative Medicine, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA, and Marilyn Bookbinder, PhD, RN, Pain Management and Palliative Care, Beth Israel Medical Center, New York, NY, USA.
| Learning Objective #1: Identify evidence based complementary therapies for symptom management in palliative care clients. |
| Learning Objective #2: Identify barriers to the use of complementary therapies in palliative care settings. |
The number of American hospitals offering palliative care services and programs is increasing rapidly. According to The Center to Advance Palliative Care, a national initiative supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 22% of all U.S. hospitals currently have palliative care programs (CAPC, 2006). The World Health Organization (2002) defines palliative care as “an approach that improves the quality of life of individuals and their families facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual." One of the primary issues of palliative care for patients with advanced disease is symptom control and quality of life. Complementary therapies have been shown to help decrease symptom distress, thus improving the quality of life in patients with advanced disease.
This presentation will describe the efforts of the authors to develop a complementary therapies screening tool that can be used at the bedside. This screening tool has two purposes: to educate the nurse as to what complementary therapies are, and to help the nurse determine with the patient which therapies would be most helpful for the specific symptoms reported by the patient. To accomplish this task, it was necessary to complete an extensive review of the literature of complementary therapies used in the treatment of commonly experienced symptoms in palliative care. Thus, this presentation will provide a review of the evidenced based literature, as well as the rationale and discussion behind the development of the educational tool and assessment instrument. In addition, barriers to the use of complementary therapies in Palliative Care settings will be discussed.