Support for Palliative Measures in Terminal Life Phases
End-of-life care is a critical phase for both patients and their families, requiring a balance of emotional, spiritual, physical, and practical support. This article aims to provide an overview of the key aspects to consider during this challenging time.
Preparing for End-of-Life Care
When deciding to care for a terminally ill family member at home, it's essential to consider various factors. These include the patient's preferences, availability of qualified support, home modifications, transportation services, professional medical help, physical abilities, and emotional preparedness. Preparing early for end-of-life care planning, seeking financial and legal advice, focusing on values, addressing family conflicts, and communicating with family members are crucial steps.
Emotional and Practical Needs
Patients
Patients in the final stages of life may experience a range of emotions, such as worry about loss of control and dignity, fear of being a burden, and fear of being abandoned. They require emotional support to find peace, dignity, and comfort, meaningful conversations, reassurance, respect for religious or cultural rituals, and help managing fear, anxiety, and spiritual distress.
Caregivers
Caregivers often find the final stage of caregiving uniquely challenging. They require psychological support to cope with emotional burden, distress, anxiety, depression, and feelings of isolation. Counseling and support groups can help process complex emotions and reduce loneliness, fostering emotional resilience and prognostic awareness to prepare for end-of-life stages.
Practical Needs
Effective symptom management, personalised care, access to rapid medical support, home-based nursing care, and assistance with daily activities are essential for patients. Caregivers need support with physical caregiving demands, education about the patient’s condition and care, psychological and spiritual care, help setting limits to caregiving roles based on abilities, and access to healthcare resources.
Hospice Care
Hospice care is an option for patients with a life expectancy of six months or less and involves palliative care to enable the patient to live their final days with the highest quality of life possible. Hospice teams provide emotional and spiritual support according to the patient's wishes and beliefs, as well as offering emotional support to the patient's family, caregivers, and loved ones, including grief counseling.
Key Considerations
Practical care and assistance, comfort and dignity, respite care, grief support, and communication are important considerations in end-of-life care. It's crucial to honour a loved one's wishes, such as advance directives and living wills, even if you don't agree with them. Reassuring your loved one it is okay to die can help both of you through this process.
In the final stages of life, patients may experience common symptoms such as drowsiness, unresponsiveness, confusion, loss of appetite, decreased need for food and fluids, loss of bladder or bowel control, cool skin, labored breathing, and noisy breathing. Providing comfort for these symptoms can involve planning visits and activities, speaking calmly, reminding the patient of their surroundings, letting the patient choose when to eat or drink, keeping the patient clean and dry, warming the patient with blankets, and turning the patient's body.
Avoid burdening the patient with your feelings of fear, sadness, and loss; talk to someone else about your feelings. Taking care of yourself during your loved one's final stages is critically important to avoid burnout.
End-of-life care for many people is often a battle to preserve their dignity and end their life as comfortably as possible. Palliative care can help control pain and symptoms such as constipation, nausea, or shortness of breath. Allow your loved one to express their fears of death, try to listen without interrupting or arguing.
Late-stage care is a time for saying goodbye to the loved one and resolving any differences. It's essential to avoid withholding difficult information; most patients prefer to be included in discussions about issues that concern them. Talking about their life and the past can help some patients gain perspective on their life and the process of dying.
Overall, both patients and caregivers benefit from comprehensive support that integrates emotional, spiritual, physical, and practical aspects, ensuring comfort, dignity, and reduced caregiver burden during the end-of-life journey.
- In the process of making arrangements for a terminally ill family member at home, it's essential to consider emotional support to help the patient find peace, dignity, and comfort, a critical aspect of health-and-wellness for mental-health during this challenging phase of life.
- As the final stage of caregiving can be emotionally taxing for caregivers, it's important to seek psychological support to cope with distress, anxiety, depression, and feelings of isolation, which are common in the context of science's understanding of mental-health issues associated with aging.
