Integrating a Palliative Approach: Essentials for Personal Support Workers – Textbook 2nd ed. Revised

Description

Written specifically for Personal Support Workers (who also work under the job title of healthcare assistants, nurse’s aides, community support workers and so on),  –  the eyes, the ears and the heart of the health care team!

This textbook is filled with practical strategies, stories of care-giving, competency touchstones and real-life scenarios. Integrating a Palliative Approach will increase your confidence, and competence in providing compassionate, culturally-safe palliative care for any person and their family.

It’s a testament to the value of the Life and Death Matters resources, that students report that our textbook is the one they prefer to keep after their program is finished.

This text will equip PSWs/HCAs with skills for responding to the changing needs of any person living with life-limiting illness, and their family.

Integrating a Palliative Approach and its companion resources can increase your competence and confidence of PSWs integrating a palliative approach.

In this textbook, you will develop ways of:

•  Reflecting on beliefs and values, and maintaining therapeutic boundaries
• Communicating, including how to avoid roadblocks and open the doors to serious conversations
• Providing culturally safe care, free of systemic racism and bias for any marginalized person, including First Nations, Inuit, Metis and urban Indigenous people
• Embedding a trauma-informed approach into your care.

You will also learn:

•  How dying has changed and ways to provide a palliative approach into the care of people with any life-limiting illness, across all care settings
•  The principles of providing palliative care for a person and their family
•  Best practices for communicating and providing compassionate care for the person and family
•  Ways to gather information and provide comfort for a person experiencing common symptoms when declining and dying
•  About the psychosocial needs of the person and family, and ways to support through grief and loss
• How to respond when a person expresses interest in advance care planning and Medical Assistance in Dying
• About common symptoms in the last days and hours, and strategies to use when providing comfort for the dying person and family
• Risks for developing compassion fatigue and creating a self-care plan
• The vital role of a PSW on the health care team, and strategies for advocating and communicating.