Palliative care and the needs of cancer and non-cancer patients Essay

Palliative care and the needs of cancer and non-cancer patients - Essay Example Nevertheless, efforts to lengthen life or to comfort are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Many patients who receive palliative care feel better and live longer than expected. The boundary between "cure" and "care" is cultivated by eligibility rules for hospice benefits established by the federal government and private insurers to limit expenditures for palliative care. Confining palliative care to those who are expected to live no longer than six months creates pointless misery for many patients. It also unjustifiably weighs down clinicians who, in several circumstances, cannot precisely and truthfully calculate whether a seriously ill patient will live three months, six months, a year, two years, or even longer. This rigid division between cure and care likewise discourages suffering patients from requesting palliative care. Based on the model definition of the Canadian Palliative Care Association, the term palliative care has been characterised as "a philosophy of care and combination of therapies intended to support persons living with life-threatening illness. Palliative care strives to meet physical, psychological, social, and spiritual needs, while remaining sensitive to personal, cultural, and religious values. Palliative care may be needed at any time in the disease trajectory, and bereavement. It may be combined with therapies aimed at reducing or curing the illness or it may be the total focus of care. Care is delivered through the collaborative efforts of an interdisciplinary team including the individual, family, and others involved in the provision of care. Where possible, palliative care should be available in the setting of personal choice" (Ferris and Cummings 1995, p.12). As it is, palliative care does not end with the death of the patient. Although not all families require sophisticated follow-up, a palliative care program must offer bereavement counseling. Physicians and oncology nurses trained to deal with families in distress can help them link up with the palliative care group (McDonald 1998, p. 1710). Early implementations of palliative care for patients with chronic, critical, or multiple illnesses reduce the need for crisis-oriented services. Early palliative care affords a basis for predicting and preparing for the inconvenience intrinsic in the treatment and care of such individuals. In certain situations, especially those children with serious diseases, early palliative care can prepare the patient for life-prolonging treatments such as chemotherapy and make the treatments more acceptable and certainly more bearable. "Quality of Life" As mentioned, a major objective of palliative care is to achieve the best quality of life for patients and their families and this aim is often evaluated by measures of quality of life. However, the concept of quality of life, is complicated and quite tricky to define, being both individual and multidimensional and, although many instruments exist which attempt to quantify it, measurement is difficult. In the

Autonomy and motivation Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Autonomy and motivation - Assignment Example Paradigm This research paper has utilized mixed research method Research Questions: The first question and probably one of the most difficult facets of any research task is the recognition of suitable research questions. Research questions are a pivotal and essential part of any quantitative research. The process of identification for qualitative research that is discussed in chapter 6, is quite dissimilar than for quantitative research (Deci and Ryan, 1985). For example, questions are usually not as narrowly constrained as they are in quantitative studies when keeping with the goals of research in qualitative studies. Questions should be interesting in that they address current and emerging issues; they need to be sufficiently constrained and narrow so that they can be answered at the same time in the same manner. Broad research questions can be easier said than done if not impossible to attend to without breaking them down into smaller questions that are answerable. Ethical conside ration As discussed by Deci and Flaste (1995), in most educational settings, one ought to obtain permission from a committee of human research before recruiting volunteers for a research project or before conducting any research (page 16). DÃ" §rnyei (1994) describes mixed methods research as a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods in a single research project. The two approaches have been identified already and there is no need replicate their main features. The methodology used was the sampling of population taken into consideration to get their responses on the contentious issues. The first batch of respondents was gotten from nine different departments of parents. Those in real estate and the building industry, structural engineering, management, hotel management, English, mechanical engineering, bilingual studies and maritime studies. The total population of the respondents was 508. Most of those interviewed were graduates and diploma holders (Dickson, 1995). Inst rumentation According to Holec (1981), typically there are two distinct types of instruments of survey data collection: interviews and questionnaires. Questionnaire instrument is given in written form, and are used where information is to be got or collected from a large number of individuals. On the other hand, interviews are orally administered and are used in cases where there is need for in-depth information from a smaller group of individuals. The instrument used to gather the information was a questionnaire. The questionnaire had four sections. Each section had its own set of information that was to be submitted at the end. The first section was to determine who was responsible, between the teachers and the students should be the one to facilitate various aspects under learning both in and out of the classroom situation according to the students’ preferences. The second section was to determine the specific views according to the students on their own abilities to carry out similar learning aspects in and out of the classroom. The third aspect aimed at gauging the amount of motivation the students could afford to uphold in learning situation, especially of the English language. The fourth section set out to find out the actual activities the learners engaged in under both the classroom and outside class environment that could be considered as a manifestation of the subject