Making Sense of Receiving Palliative Treatment

Abstract

The attention of health professionals must be directed at recognizing and enhancing patients' ways of seeking knowledge to help them make sense of receiving palliative treatment. Person-centered activities need to be developed.

Meanings of existential uncertainty and certainty for people diagnosed with cancer and receiving palliative treatment: a life-world phenomenological study

“…The present study is a secondary aim of a larger project about information provision among people receiving palliative cancer care [28,29,31] where the fieldwork was informed by life-world phenomenology [12,32]. The analysis was performed according to hermeneutic interpretive principles out of Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation in three inter-related steps: naïve reading, structural analysis and interpreted whole [33-35].…”

“…All of them had children but only three had children at home, one had deceased children, and three were widowed with adult children. The participants had a range of occupational backgrounds, and differed in their employment status (8 were retired, 3 on sick leave and 3 worked part time and part-time on sick leave) and the majority had a history of cancer in the family (for more details, see [28]).…”

“…Receiving bad news is well known to be challenging information [26,27], but so is making sense of receiving palliative treatments [28]. Further, in relation to patients’ quest for knowledge in order to deal with advanced cancer, existential uncertainty in connection with life-threatening disease transforms into existential certainty [29].…”

“…Earlier research clearly shows that while the information needs of patients are marked, they are also complex in relation to fluctuations in the progression of the disease. Further research is needed regarding what the vacillation between uncertainty and certainty, as illustrated by these studies, means to the patient [28,29]. The purpose of this study is to interpret meanings of existential uncertainty and certainty for people diagnosed with advanced gastrointestinal cancer and receiving palliative treatment.…”

Palliative Care as the Driving Force for Providing Psychological Comfort to Patients with Cancer: A Hermeneutic Study

“…The results of a study conducted in Germany also showed that the delivery of palliative care to cancer patients is the ongoing process of understanding patients and making sense of their conditions. On the other hand, an essential prerequisite to empathy is active listening which significantly reduces patients' stress (28). As an empathetic behavior, our participants strived to place themselves in patients' shoes or considered them as their own family members.…”