Palliative Care News

The July issue of Palliative Medicine features22 systemic reviews of topics relating to opioid treatment in cancer pain. This was done as part of updating the European Association for Palliative Care guidelines. As the editorial by Drs. Kassa and Haugen suggests, even with the advances in pain research in recent years, there is still a great need for systematic research in pain.

Although many call the current era of cancer care the personalized care era, the oncology community is practicing in an evidence-based era that began about 15 to 20 years ago with the introduction of clinical practice guidelines.

The administration of intravenous iron improved self-reported fatigue in a group of 90 premenopausal women with low serum ferritin concentration, particularly those with levels less than 15 ng/mL.

Results of an analysis conducted by the Center to Advance Palliative Care and the National Palliative Care Research Center showed that 63% of US hospitals with at least 50 beds now employ a palliative care team, an increase of 138.3% in the past decade.

Discussing with a child that a parent will die is heartbreaking. It is fundamental to consider the child’s age when discussing this issue.

Much of the discussion about opioids to treat chronic pain separates cancer pain from noncancer pain. The two are more similar than people would think, according to David S. Craig, PharmD, BCPS, clinical pharmacist specialist and director of the Pain and Palliative Care Specialty Residency, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa, Fla.

2011 ASCO Annual Meeting

Have you ever had a patient who did not have capacity to make medical decisions? These are vulnerable patients who have impairments and disabilities caused by medical or psychiatric conditions. In patients with cancer, this can be particularly challenging because they may have impaired capacity caused by their cancer or adverse effects of treatment. Many treatments are longitudinal and require active participation from the patient, which becomes complicated if a patient’s decision-making capacity changes. It can also be challenging to enroll patients in research who cannot participate in the informed-consent process.

Although the American Academy of Pediatrics’ policy statement on palliative care for children is more than 10 years old, a number of barriers have been in place that prevent children with life-limiting or life-threatening disorders from receiving high-quality palliative care. Although the list of barriers is extensive, one prominent barrier is the lack of payment for the wide variety of resources these children need.

Survivorship planning is becoming more and more of an important issue in caring for cancer patients. Specifically, creating a survivorship care plan is becoming increasingly important and valuable. However, how each cancer clinic and cancer center goes about survivorship planning varies and, at least to my eyes, not one consistent method has risen to the top as the preferred way. So, I welcomed this article from Hahn and Ganz which looked at the survivorship care planning process in four very different institutions: an academic center, a community hospital, a primary-care medical group and a county hospital. Within each group the authors performed a semi-structured interview about their survivorship program and how they developed and used their survivorship care plans.