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Palliative Care in Residential Settings

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Textbook of Palliative Care

Abstract

Many residential care settings for older people have been established on a culture of rehabilitation. However, this is changing. In many Western countries, recent policy is encouraging frail older people to stay longer in their own homes before going into 24-h care. As a result, on admission to these settings, older people are often considerably more dependent and frail than 10 years ago.

The palliative care needs of frail older people with multiple comorbidities admitted to residential care settings are significant. Palliative care is core to their work; such settings are now being compared to the former hospices that founded the hospice movement some 50 years ago. Hospices have an important role to play in reaching out to staff in residential care settings and the frail older people they care for in order to support and enhance a palliative care approach.

This chapter describes some of the differences between palliative care for people with advanced cancer (often dying in mid-life) and those dying as a frail older person at the end of their lives with multiple comorbidities. It highlights a number of different quality improvement initiatives through which staff in residential care settings can be supported to adopt a greater palliative care approach.

Currently, nearly a quarter of the population in the UK, in Canada, and the USA die in care homes. In other countries, such as The Netherlands and Norway where there is greater on-site healthcare provision including physicians, it is nearer 50% of the country’s population.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Primary Palliative Care Research Group, Centre for Population Health Sciences, The Usher Institute of Population Health Sciences and Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland

    Jo Hockley

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  1. Jo Hockley
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Correspondence to Jo Hockley .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. HammondCare Learning and Research Centre, Greenwich Hospital, Greenwich, New South Wales, Australia

    Roderick Duncan MacLeod

  2. Vrije Universiteit Brussel, VUB-UGent End-of-Life Care Research Grou Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

    Lieve Van den Block

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Hockley, J. (2018). Palliative Care in Residential Settings. In: MacLeod, R., Van den Block, L. (eds) Textbook of Palliative Care. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31738-0_49-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31738-0_49-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-31738-0

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