1st Edition

Supportive and Palliative Care in Cancer An Introduction

    This book provides a clear approach to establishing a user involvement system in a healthcare organisation and its potential impact on cancer services. Using a tool kit style approach drawing on examples of successful past projects and case studies to provide evidence of good practice it describes how to plan and implement different stages of user involvement enabling organisations to draw on user experience and expertise to evaluate develop and improve the quality of service that they provide. Members of regional cancer networks multidisciplinary cancer care teams and all those involved in the NHS cancer services will find this toolkit interesting reading.

    Section 1: Cancer 1. What is cancer? 2. What causes cancer? 3. Types of cancer 4. Detecting cancer 5. Cancer diagnosis and monitoring Section 2: Cancer treatments 6. How is cancer treatment chosen? 7. Surgery 8. Radiotherapy: overview 9. Radiotherapy: side effects 10. Chemotherapy: overview 11. Chemotherapy: side effects 12. Hormone therapy Section 3: Supportive and palliative care 13. What is palliative care? 14. Principles of palliative care 15. Palliative care: who and when? Section 4: Cancer pain 16. What is pain? 17. What sorts of pain are there? 18. When a patient is in pain, what should I do? 19. Drugs used to treat pain 20. Isn't morphine dangerous? 21. What do I do if the pain is getting worse? Section 5: Symptoms 22. How can I help a patient who is constipated? 23. What can I do when a patient is nauseated or vomiting? 24. How can I help a breathless patient? 25. How can I help a patient with fatigue and weakness? 26. What can I do when a patient does not want to eat or drink? 27. Maintaining an environment for eating 28. How can I help the patient with mouth problems? Section 6: Communication 29. Why is communication so important? 30. What can I do to relieve a person's anxiety? 31. How do I answer a difficult question? 32. What about breaking bad or difficult news? 33. How can I help an angry person? 34. How can I help a withdrawn patient? 35. How can I help a confused patient? 36. Do children understand what is going on? 37. How does illness affect how we see ourselves? 38. Identifying distress when communication is poor Section 7: Dying and bereavement 39. What is loss and grief? 40. How can I support the patient, partner and relative? 41. How do I help with a dying patient's distress? 42. What do I do when a patient dies? 43. Death of a patient's friend or relative 44. Supporting staff after a patient has died 45. Complicated grief Section 8: Spirituality and equality 46. Fostering hope 47. What is spirituality? 48. How can I help someone with a different faith to mine? 49. How can I avoid discrimination?

    Biography

    Claud F B Regnard, Margaret Kindlen