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End-of-life care (EOLC) is health care provided in the time leading up to a person's death.End-of-life care can be provided in the hours, days, or months before a person dies and encompasses care and support for a person's mental and emotional needs, physical comfort, spiritual needs, and practical tasks.
In medicine, specifically in end-of-life care, palliative sedation (also known as terminal sedation, continuous deep sedation, or sedation for intractable distress of a dying patient) is the palliative practice of relieving distress in a terminally ill person in the last hours or days of a dying person's life, usually by means of a continuous intravenous or subcutaneous infusion of a sedative ...
Terminal illness or end-stage disease is a disease that cannot be cured or adequately treated and is expected to result in the death of the patient. This term is more commonly used for progressive diseases such as cancer, rather than fatal injury. In popular use, it indicates a disease that will progress until death with near absolute certainty ...
Under Medicare guidelines, hospice patients require a terminal diagnosis or markers of a life-threatening condition — such as severe weight loss or loss of mobility — indicating the person will likely die within six months or sooner. Maples did not have a terminal illness. Her diagnosis was “debility, unspecified,” according to her records.
The field of palliative care grew out of the hospice movement, which is commonly associated with Dame Cicely Saunders, who founded St. Christopher's Hospice for the terminally ill in 1967, [21] and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who published her seminal work "On Death and Dying" in 1969. [citation needed] In 1974, Balfour Mount coined the term ...
The concept of hospice as a place to treat the incurably ill has been evolving since the 11th century. Hospice care was introduced to the United States in the 1970s in response to the work of Cicely Saunders in the United Kingdom. This part of health care has expanded as people face a variety of issues with terminal illness.
Being Mortal is a meditation on how people can better live with age-related frailty, serious illness, and approaching death. Gawande calls for a change in the way that medical professionals treat patients approaching their ends.
Advance directives were created in response to the increasing sophistication and prevalence of medical technology. [3] [4] Numerous studies have documented critical deficits in the medical care of the dying; it has been found to be unnecessarily prolonged, [5] painful, [6] expensive, [7] [8] and emotionally burdensome to both patients and their families.