Compassion

Background: To design high-quality home-based hospice and palliative care (HBHPC) systems, it is imperative to understand the perspectives of parents whose children enroll in HBHPC programs.

Background: The secondary impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are distress triggers and risk factors for mental health. Conversely, self-compassion skills and compassionate thoughts/behaviors towards suffering may contribute to their alleviation. Both psychological constructs are interrelated in life-threatening diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS).

Objectives: To provide an overview of the current use of mindfulness- and compassion-based interventions with family carers of older adults, to aid primary healthcare practitioners in their decision-making around referral to wider healthcare services. The study was guided by four research questions: what interventions are currently used; whom they are used with; why they are used; and their evidence-base in terms of acceptability and effectiveness. Methods: A scoping study using the methodological frameworks of Arksey and O'Malley and Levac et al.

Four decades ago, my parents were not permitted to hold their dying infant because they were “visitors” to the intensive care unit. I learned from them that our health care policies sometimes carry huge human costs. As a geriatrician and medical director of a long-term care (LTC) facility, I have learned that family members are not merely visitors; family members are critical partners in our care.

Extract: Caring for an older family member can be a challenging and stressful experience, and there is a need to better support family carers in their role.(1) Drawing on a rapidly growing body of research conducted with various population groups, (2) there is reason to suggest that psychological interventions that target self‐compassion could be particularly relevant in supporting family carers of older adults.

In the act of caring for and helping people in the end-of-life process, the professional who provides care and assistance must know how to maintain a relationship of closeness, empathy, and compassion for the pain and suffering of the person who is going to die. The objective was to understand, elaborate on, and characterize the key elements of end-of-life care of patients from a caregiver's perspective through a qualitative phenomenological multicenter study. Participants were caregivers who had lost a family member at least 2 months but less than 2 years in the past.

Objectives: Informal caregivers are vulnerable to poor mental health and quality of life (QoL). Self-compassion may protect against this. This study investigated depression and QoL in partner caregivers of people with a long-term or neurological condition (e.g. dementia or spinal cord injury) and explored the extent to which QoL and self-compassion are predictive of depression. Design: A cross-sectional, questionnaire design. Methods: Participants were recruited from charities and support groups.

Objectives: This review sought to synthesize published evidence about the role of self-compassion on health outcomes for family carers of older adults, to describe the current state of knowledge.; Method: Using an integrative review method that permitted any research design, eight databases were searched. Extensive searching of gray literature sources was also undertaken.

Purpose: Pain is a multifactorial and subjective experience. Psychological and social factors can modulate it. This study analyzed whether and how prolonged cancer pain is related to the social-relational environment's characteristics. Specifically, we investigated whether the caregiver's emotional support, his/her compassion ability or, on the contrary, his/her personal distress, associates with the patient's pain level. Methods: The sample consisted of 38 cancer patients suffering from pain and 38 family caregivers.

In this paper, we present new insight into the ways in which carers of people with dementia make decisions in the context of seemingly declining autonomy and freedom associated with the condition. Our focus is on the ways in which carers reflect on decisions made in different temporal contexts (day-to-day, medium- and long term). Drawing on data and analysis from in-depth interviews with male informal carers of women with mild to moderate dementia living in the northwest of England, we outline how the decision-making process is dependent on the temporality of the decisions.