Oral care for hospice patients with severe trismus.
Summary of "Oral care for hospice patients with severe trismus."
Oral care is a hallmark of attentive, high-quality nursing care. Oral care improves a patient's sense of well-being, communication, and nutritional status, and lowers the risk for pneumonia. However, for patients with severe trismus, oral care may seem impossible. Trismus is the inability to open the mouth more than 35 mm and often results from medical therapies for head and neck cancers. This article details a simple approach to oral care that was implemented successfully with five hospice patients with severe trismus.
Affiliation
Mary Potter Hospice, Wellington, Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Journal Details
This article was published in the following journal.
Name: Clinical journal of oncology nursing
ISSN: 1538-067X
Pages: 113-4
Links
- PubMed Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22459519
- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1188/12.CJON.113-114
Medical and Biotech [MESH] Definitions
Hospice Care
Specialized health care, supportive in nature, provided to a dying person. A holistic approach is often taken, providing patients and their families with legal, financial, emotional, or spiritual counseling in addition to meeting patients' immediate physical needs. Care may be provided in the home, in the hospital, in specialized facilities (HOSPICES), or in specially designated areas of long-term care facilities. The concept also includes bereavement care for the family. (From Dictionary of Health Services Management, 2d ed)
After-hours Care
Medical care provided after the regular practice schedule of the physicians. Usually it is designed to deliver 24-hour-a-day and 365-day-a-year patient care coverage for emergencies, triage, pediatric care, or hospice care.
Physicians, Primary Care
Providers of initial care for patients. These PHYSICIANS refer patients when appropriate for secondary or specialist care.
Day Care
Institutional health care of patients during the day. The patients return home at night.
Patient Admission
The process of accepting patients. The concept includes patients accepted for medical and nursing care in a hospital or other health care institution.
PubMed Articles
Barriers to Hospice Care in Alabama: Provider-Based Perceptions.
Few studies have evaluated barriers to hospice from a hospice provider perspective. We assessed such views via a postal survey to all licensed hospices in Alabama (N = 193)-response = 55.4%. Most prov...
Reliability and validity of a new method of nurse-led assessment of trismus.
Our aim was to develop a way of measuring trismus and evaluating it in terms of reliability and validity for use by nurses who care for patients with head and neck cancer. We developed a method from e...
Population-based studies investigating access to palliative care often use death in a hospice as a proxy for service use. We linked data from a large South London hospice to Thames Cancer Registry (TC...
Factors Associated With Favorable Attitudes Toward end of Life Planning.
Planning for end-of-life (EOL) care can result in better patient outcomes and lowered health care costs. We hypothesized that knowledge and experiences with EOL care would influence patients' EOL plan...
PURPOSE Patients with cancer represent the largest diagnostic group of hospice users, with 560,000 referred for hospice in 2008. Oncologists rely on hospice teams to provide care for patients who have...
Clinical Trials
Efficacy of Hylenex in the Treatment of Pain Among Hospice Patients
The overall aim of this study is to find out whether Hylenex recombinant (for short, Hylenex) in subcutaneous (SC) injection improves the speed and effectiveness of SC opioids in hospice p...
Caregiver Assessments of the Quality of Home Hospice Care
The Objectives are to administer the Family Evaluation of Hospice Care (FEHC) questionnaire and The Texas Revised Inventory of Grief (TRIG) to caregivers previously enrolled into the paren...
Dynasplint Therapy for Trismus in Head and Neck Cancer
This trial is a single-institution, randomized study to evaluate the effectiveness of the Dynasplint Trismus System (DTS) for patients with trismus. Improvement of mouth opening and qualit...
The purpose of this study is to determine whether Etodalac, Etoricoxib and Dexamethasone are effective for Prevention of Pain ,Swelling and Trismus Following Third Molar Surgery
Methylphenidate for Depressed Cancer Patients Receiving Palliative Care
The purpose of this study is to determine whether methylphenidate is an effective treatment for depression and to document the safety and tolerability of methylphenidate in combination wit...
