Fundamental Aspects of Palliative Care - Softcover

"Excellent book. Very clearly defined with good reference to evidence base and gives very helpful case studies and reflective exercises for future practice ... Would recommend as an essential insight for gold standard palliative care ... Excellent scope of content. Appears to cover all angles." - Denise Douglas, Lecturer in Palliative Care, Saint Francis Hospice. "This book is a thoughtful and thought provoking text and will be a useful addition to the library of anyone teaching or taking palliative care courses or placements in end-of-life care settings" - Dion Smyth, Lecturer-practitioner in Cancer and Palliative Care, Birmingham City University, in The International Journal of Palliative Nursing 2010, Vol 16, No 8. "This course is run by Nairobi Hospice as a franchise from Oxford Brookes University ... This donation is highly valued by the staff who run the course and by the students." - Dave Roberts, Senior Lecturer in Cancer & Palliative Care, Oxford Brookes University. "Robert Becker is an experienced educator in palliative care nursing. His wealth of experience shows in the preparation of the second edition of this well-respected textbook. It is aimed at a specific market - British nursing students. The way information is presented in easily 'predigested' chunks can be seen either as helpful to busy students or as contributing to a trend that does not encourage scholarly skills... There is a good section dealing with 'life closure skills'. It was good to see emphasis placed on the multicultural needs for end of life care. The author acknowledges diversity and how hard it is to 'get things right'. This book will be a useful purchase for nursing students, but I hope that nurse teachers will encourage students to take a critical stance on some of the claims it makes.' - Sheila Payne, director, International Observatory on End of Life Care, Lancaster University, Cancer Nursing Practice, April 2011, Volume 10, Number 3

This new and expanded edition is aimed directly at the learning needs of student nurses and is unique in that context. Whilst there are many high quality books available for academic study in palliative care this is currently the only one that balances a strong educational focus for developing nursing practice with an understanding of the particular needs of student nurses. The text maintains a sensitive and supportive approach to the key themes of palliative care nursing, but contains important new material of a wide range of initiatives that are impacting on end of life care across the UK. It will provide the reader with a concise, easy to read and learning oriented text that will give advice and direction to the many challenges faced in this most important area of patient care.Each chapter examines a key component of care and new features include: learning outcomes at the start of each chapter to guide the reader; clinical anecdotes to illustrate the reality and complexity of practice; extensive use of recognisable symbols to guide the reader and improve the usability of the text; competency assessment to help gauge knowledge and progress; reflective points to aid professional development; reflective activities to enable the student to reinforce learning from practice; links to appropriate clauses of the current 2008 NMC Code of Professional Conduct; quality internet resources relevant to chapter content; self assessment multiple choice tests at the end of each chapter to consolidate learning; and, an extensive palliative care quiz covering the main topic areas of the book to test knowledge. This can be used as evidence with professional portfolios.