Palliative Care Nursing: Principles and Evidence for Practice

PART ONE:  Who is the palliative care patient?

1. Who is the palliative care patient?
2. Issues of referral to and accessing palliative care
3. Where is palliative care provided?
4. Engaging patients and families in the organisation, care and research of palliative care
5. Living with an uncertain prognosis
6. Clinical assessment and outcome measurement

PART TWO: Providing palliative nursing care

7. Communication and Palliative Care Nursing
8. Physical symptom management, with a focus on nursing interventions for complex symptoms
9. Psychological symptoms and the promotion of psychological wellbeing
10. Spiritual care
11. Identity, person centred care and dignity
12. Caring for informal carers
13. Palliative care for those in disadvantaged groups
14. Advanced and expanded roles in palliative care nursing

PART THREE: Caring around the time of death
 
15. Preparing and Planning for Death
16. The last days and hours of life
17. Understanding and assessing grief and bereavement
18. Bereavement care
19. The Costs and Rewards of Caring in Palliative Care

PART FOUR: Challenging issues in palliative care nursing

20. Decision-making and capacity: principles relating to ethical issues in palliative care nursing
21. Assisted dying: a global overview
22. Facilitating change in palliative care
23. Preparing to work in palliative care: developing educational competence
24. Building the evidence-base for palliative care nursing: overcoming challenges in research, knowledge transfer and implementation
25. Growing and developing palliative care worldwide:  assessing and developing public health approaches to palliative care

What can nurses do to support those receiving palliative care?
How do you ensure clear communication and maintain patients’ and families’ preferences?

Palliative Care Nursing is essential reading for nursing students, professional nurses and other health and social care professionals providing supportive and palliative care to those with advanced illness or who are towards the end of life. This third edition of the acclaimed textbook has been extensively revised and examines important research studies, key debates around care and strategies to advance palliative care nursing.

In four sections, the book covers key elements of nursing practice towards the end of life:

• Defining the palliative care patient
• Providing palliative nursing care
• Caring around the time of death
• Challenging issues in palliative care nursing

Leading authors address contemporary issues and explore how to provide high quality person-centred palliative care, encouraging application to practice through exercises and case studies. Chapters completely reworked or new for this edition include those on communication, living with uncertainty, bereavement care, the costs of caring, nurses’ decision-making and capacity, and palliative care worldwide.

The clarity of evidence presented and coverage of a diverse range of topics make this the foundational textbook for all studying palliative care at pre-registration level, postgraduate level or as part of CPD study.

With a foreword by last edition editor, Professor Sheila Payne, Lancaster University, UK.

‘I welcome this third edition of Palliative Care Nursing and congratulations to the new team who have provided us with a dynamic and innovative development of a core text for palliative nursing practice. As the largest workforce in palliative care, and given the changing face of clinical practice for nurses, including increased educational opportunity and expanding roles and responsibilities, this book is timely in its focus on critical issues which frame and scope the reality of palliative care and the nursing contribution to that discipline. The learning exercises, in particular, offer tools for educators and clinicians to reflect on practice and understand new ways of knowing in palliative care. It will be an excellent resource for nursing, both in the UK and Ireland and to the wider international audience, having drawn on the breadth of global nursing expertise to bring this book together’. 

Philip Larkin, Professor of Clinical Nursing (Palliative Care), University College Dublin and Our Lady’s Hospice and Care Services, Dublin, Ireland; President, European Association for Palliative Care

‘This is a book of substance that captures the current status of palliative nursing, including the values and research evidence that underpin it. The changing nature of palliative nursing as an evidence-based specialism is balanced with practical skills and insights from experts, and also considers the needs of those working with, or concerned about, the dying person’s well-being.
It covers a range of challenging issues as well as drawing on the wisdom of those who actually undertake this work on a daily basis. I hope that students and practitioners from all disciplines will find this a useful resource to understand the art and craft of good palliative nursing’.

Professor Daniel Kelly, Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing and Royal College of Nursing Chair of Nursing Research, Cardiff University, UK