Purpose: The purpose of this preliminary, pre-post, interventional project was to (1) explore the pervasiveness of compassion fatigue & (2) promote self-care activities & evaluate the effectiveness of compassion fatigue education on reducing hospice nursing staffs' compassion fatigue symptoms in a single hospice care unit. Background and…

Purpose: It is critical to assess hospice professionals' discrimination between adaptive and maladaptive reactions to terminal illness in persons at the end-of-life to assure targeted intervention aimed at maintaining quality of life. The proposed measure, the Hospice Professionals Understanding of Preparatory Grief scale (HPPG), contains…

Social workers rarely receive education and training in the areas of grief, bereavement, and death and dying, which may lead to difficulties in compassionately and ethically addressing concerns in end-of-life or grief-related contexts. This article presents actual and potential outcomes from three challenging end-of-life case studies using…

The Delphi technique was used to obtain expert panel consensus to prioritize content areas and delivery methods for developing staff grief and bereavement curriculum training in the intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) field. The Delphi technique was conducted with a panel of 18 experts from formal and informal disability caregiving,…

Despite their interest in completing advance directives (ADs), persons experiencing homelessness (PEH) appear to have fewer surrogate decision-makers and limited opportunities for advance care planning (ACP). Nursing students and faculty, a hospital bioethicist, and social service agency staff formed a community-academic partnership that helps PEH…

This report describes a joint effort of a community hospice and a university counseling center to provide a campus grief group for university students led by a hospice counselor and a counseling center clinical psychologist. Hospice provided a curriculum outlining topics and activities for each of the group's six meetings. Notices announcing…

Background: Community-based peer support may help meet the practical, emotional, and spiritual needs of African Americans with advanced cancer. Support teams are a unique model of peer support for persons facing serious illness, but research is rare. This study sought to (a) implement new volunteer support teams for African Americans with advanced…

The reach of art therapy in assisting a hospice patient in confronting existential issues at the end of life is illustrated in this article with a case that took place over the course of 22 semiweekly sessions. Painting with an art therapist allowed the patient to shift from a state of anxiety and existential dread to a more accepting, fluid…

As life expectancy of people with intellectual disability (ID) has increased, there has been a concurrent increase in age-related illnesses and conditions similar to that of the general population. These circumstances result in people with ID dying from typical life-ending conditions, and thus, they require similar end-of-life services such as…

The hospice philosophy was founded on a mission to provide comprehensive and holistic services to individuals at the end of life. Hospice interdisciplinary teams work together to offer therapies such as spiritual services, comfort care, and massage therapy to meet patients' physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual needs. Although the…

Decisions about treatment and options for care at the end stage of an advanced chronic illness are important determinants of the quality of a person's death and of how family members adapt in bereavement. This article describes the steps taken to secure federal funding to study how people make the decision to enroll in hospice. The National…

Background: Little is known of paid carers' perspectives when caring for people with intellectual disabilities at the end-of-life. Materials and methods: Sixty four individuals from intellectual disability services took part in 12 focus groups. Interviews were analysed using framework analysis. Results: Participants wanted to provide palliative…

The need to attend to terminally ill persons and provide improved quality of living and dying should be a national priority in Canada. Hospice palliative care (HPC), a person-centered approach that addresses the needs of the whole person, improves the quality of living and dying of persons facing a life-threatening illness. To ensure Canadians are…

Background: Research on staffed housing for people with intellectual disability has identified the challenges in achieving positive quality of life outcomes. However, a less well considered dimension of such services is that they are places of living and dying. This paper looks at the experiences of staff in dealing with issues of death and dying.…

Because of their extensive experience with death and dying, hospice volunteers may be more successful at engaging in meaning-making regarding their death-related experiences than their low point life experiences (e.g., job loss). Consequently, their memories of death-related experiences will manifest more meaning-making strategies (e.g.,…