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The views and opinions expressed in our blog series are those of the authors and are not necessarily supported by CareSearch, Flinders University and/or the Australian Government Department of Health.
CareSearch is an online resource for palliative care. It has evidence-based resources for both clinicians and for patients, and their families and friends. As it is now a very large repository of evidence-based information, I would like to point you to four of the best sections for GPs to start off in.
These sections include the GP Hub, the Clinical Evidence pages, the Finding and Using Evidence pages, and the Education pages. You can also find information specially written for your patients in the Patients, Carers, and Families section.
Chronic breathlessness is highly prevalent across the community. One in 100 Australians have significant impairment of their activities of daily living and one in 300 people are housebound because of breathlessness.
Chronic breathlessness is systematically under-recognised by health professionals. When taking a history about breathlessness, the question ‘are you breathless?’ is not going to elicit the problem nor its magnitude. ‘What do you have to avoid in order to minimise breathlessness?’ is a far more important question, or this can also be phrased as ‘what have you given up in order not to be breathless?’ With these questions, we start to get a picture of the net impact of breathlessness on individual patients.
People living with a life-limiting illness, such as cancer, frequently report moderate to severe pain and describe in detail how it affects activities of daily living and quality of life. What matters most – be it spending quality time with grandchildren, time in the garden, or writing down their favourite life anecdotes – becomes hard work and wearisome in the face of uncontrolled pain. Yet in managing this beast that is pain, management with opioids has its own share of issues. Fortunately, with some thought at the point of prescribing, whether initiating or reviewing therapy, general practitioners (GPs) can anticipate these issues. Here are five tips to improve confidence with opioid use in the terminally ill.
One of the most troubling aspects of caring for people at the end of life is caring for those left behind. The problem is simple – everyone focusses on the ill person while curative treatment is attempted. Everyone knows the supporting spouse, child, or friend is there, but the person with the illness is the patient, not the carer. However, being a carer is a risky business. Most carers have little health knowledge or background. The fear of doing the wrong thing and making the ill person worse is ever present. They do not know what is going to happen, and if things go wrong, whom to call and what to do. Studies of carers and patients at the end of life repeatedly show that the carers are more anxious and depressed than the patients themselves.