Palliative Care Nursing: Quality Care to the End of Life

"This 5th edition is an important achievement; it is a symbol of commitment to the field of palliative nursing, where we have been and where we are going."

- Betty Rolling Ferrell, PhD, MA, FAAN, FPCN, CHPN

From the Foreword

The aging population has only grown since the first edition of this comprehensive and seminal publication nearly 20 years ago. Based on the need to humanize rather than medicalize the illness experience for patients, this text delves into palliative care beyond the specific diseases affecting the patient. Instead, content focuses on the whole person and family.

Palliative patients struggle with chronic, debilitating, and painful conditions, and grapple with the fact that life as they knew it has already passed away. Families and friends reciprocally suffer, not knowing how to help and therefore become the secondary victims of the disease. This is not the challenge of a lone nurse, or a single physician, therapist, or social worker. Rather, palliative and hospice care requires the expertise and unique roles of an interprofessional team to help the patient and family strengthen their resilience, continue to find meaning and purpose in life, and cure what can be cured.

Palliative Care Nursing, Fifth Edition, delivers advanced empirical, aesthetic, ethical and personal knowledge. This new edition brings an increased focus on outcomes, benchmarking progress, and goals of care. It expounds upon the importance of the cross-disciplinary collaboration introduced in the previous edition. Every chapter in Sections I, II, and III includes content written by a non-nursing member of the interprofessional team. Based on best-evidence and clinical practice guidelines, this text presents comprehensive, targeted interventions responsive to the needs of palliative and hospice patients and family. Each chapter contains compassionate, timely, appropriate, and cost-effective care for diverse populations across the illness trajectory.

Key Features

• The expanded new edition offers current, comprehensive, one-stop source of highly-relevant clinical information on palliative care
• Life-span approach: age-appropriate nursing considerations (e.g. geriatric, pediatric and family)
• Includes disease-specific and symptom-specific nursing management chapters
• Promotes a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to palliative care
• Offers important legal, ethical and cultural considerations related to death and dying
• Case Studies with Case Study Conclusion in each clinical chapter

New to The Fifth Edition:

• An expanded chapter on Palliative Care incorporates most up to date scope and standards, information on Basic and Advanced HPNA certification, self-reflection and self-care for nurses.
• A chapter on Interprofessional Collaboration
• Instructor Resources: Power points and Test bank

Marianne Matzo, PhD, APRN-CNP, AOCNP, ACHPN, FPCN, FAAN, is the director of research for the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2012, she pioneered the development of the Supportive Care Center at the Peggy and Charles Stephenson Cancer Center in Oklahoma City and continues to counsel patients there for sexual health following their cancer diagnosis. She is an oncology nurse practitioner at the VA Medical Center and is a clinical professor at the Department of Family Medicine, University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. She was the first nurse to be awarded the prestigious Project on Death in America Faculty Scholars Fellowship, funded by the Soros Foundation. Dr. Matzo was awarded a doctorate in gerontology from the University of Massachusetts--Boston and a master's degree in nursing from the Gerontological Nurse Practitioner program at the University of Massachusetts--Lowell. She has presented educational programs regionally, nationally, and internationally on many topics related to care of the dying person, gerontological nursing, and curriculum development. She has authored four books, including two published by Springer Publishing; is a member of several nursing and palliative care editorial boards; and has published numerous data-based and scholarly articles.

Deborah Witt Sherman, PhD, APRN, ANP-BC, ACHPN, FAAN, is a professor with tenure at Florida International University and has a strong career in education, research, clinical practice, leadership, and administration. Dr. Sherman is certified as an adult nurse practitioner and a palliative care nurse practitioner. She was awarded the Prestigious Project on Death in America Faculty Scholars Fellowship, funded by the Soros Foundation, to start palliative care in the United States along with 11 other PhD nurses and 74 physicians. In 2009, she received the Hospice and Palliative Care Nurses Association's "Leading the Way Award," which is the highest honor recognizing her implementation of the first Palliative Care Nurse Practitioner Program in the United States and the first national certification examination in Advanced Palliative Care Nursing. In November 2011, Dr. Sherman was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award in Nursing from MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Dr. Sherman also serves as a professor at Tenshi College in Hokkaido, Japan, where she implemented Japan's first Palliative Care Master's Program in Nursing. Besides serving as the coeditor of this award-winning textbook, she has published several other books related to palliative care, over 35 book chapters, and 80 peer-reviewed research and clinical practice publications. Dr. Sherman has been a keynote speaker and presenter on topics regarding nursing, interprofessional collaboration, and palliative care at over 190 local, regional, national, and international conferences.