How Confident Are We at Assessing and Managing Fatigue in Palliative Care Patients? A Multicenter Survey Exploring the Current Attitudes of Palliative Care Professionals
Background: Fatigue is a common and significant problem for palliative care (PC) patients, affecting up to 80% of patients. Health care professionals (HCPs) commonly underestimate its significance and lack the confidence in how to manage it, resulting in poor quality of life. It is currently not kno...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Mary Ann Liebert
2020-05-01
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| Series: | Palliative Medicine Reports |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/PMR.2020.0005 |
| _version_ | 1797346100501282816 |
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| author | Gemma Ingham Katalin Urban |
| author_facet | Gemma Ingham Katalin Urban |
| author_sort | Gemma Ingham |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Background: Fatigue is a common and significant problem for palliative care (PC) patients, affecting up to 80% of patients. Health care professionals (HCPs) commonly underestimate its significance and lack the confidence in how to manage it, resulting in poor quality of life. It is currently not known how PC professionals manage fatigue in clinical practice or what the barriers to implementation are.
Objective: To determine the current attitudes of HCPs toward fatigue management in patients with a life-limiting illness.
Design/Setting: An electronic survey, created on REDCap, was distributed to all staff working directly with PC patients in both the community and inpatient setting within the Sydney Local Health District. The study duration was for four weeks (May 1?30, 2018).
Results: Participants recognized that fatigue is common, but only 58.5% recognized that severe fatigue is more distressing than pain. A total of 77.2% of participants do not find fatigue an easy symptom to manage and less than half (46.9%) feel confident assessing and managing it. There was no consistent systematic approach to management although exercise, education, and pacing/energy conservation were recognized as important interventions. Themes identified as potential barriers to management included lack of resources, poor patient and staff understanding, and patient/disease factors.
Conclusions: HCPs lack confidence in assessing fatigue and completing an individualized management plan; the approaches adopted are highly variable. This justifies the need for further education, as well as further research assessing the efficacy of a multimodal intervention and a guideline to assist in management. |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-08T11:28:00Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-7fe907040ba9402e8d84092dfe16b56f |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 2689-2820 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-08T11:28:00Z |
| publishDate | 2020-05-01 |
| publisher | Mary Ann Liebert |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Palliative Medicine Reports |
| spelling | doaj.art-7fe907040ba9402e8d84092dfe16b56f2024-01-26T04:50:20ZengMary Ann LiebertPalliative Medicine Reports2689-28202020-05-0111586510.1089/PMR.2020.0005How Confident Are We at Assessing and Managing Fatigue in Palliative Care Patients? A Multicenter Survey Exploring the Current Attitudes of Palliative Care ProfessionalsGemma InghamKatalin UrbanBackground: Fatigue is a common and significant problem for palliative care (PC) patients, affecting up to 80% of patients. Health care professionals (HCPs) commonly underestimate its significance and lack the confidence in how to manage it, resulting in poor quality of life. It is currently not known how PC professionals manage fatigue in clinical practice or what the barriers to implementation are. Objective: To determine the current attitudes of HCPs toward fatigue management in patients with a life-limiting illness. Design/Setting: An electronic survey, created on REDCap, was distributed to all staff working directly with PC patients in both the community and inpatient setting within the Sydney Local Health District. The study duration was for four weeks (May 1?30, 2018). Results: Participants recognized that fatigue is common, but only 58.5% recognized that severe fatigue is more distressing than pain. A total of 77.2% of participants do not find fatigue an easy symptom to manage and less than half (46.9%) feel confident assessing and managing it. There was no consistent systematic approach to management although exercise, education, and pacing/energy conservation were recognized as important interventions. Themes identified as potential barriers to management included lack of resources, poor patient and staff understanding, and patient/disease factors. Conclusions: HCPs lack confidence in assessing fatigue and completing an individualized management plan; the approaches adopted are highly variable. This justifies the need for further education, as well as further research assessing the efficacy of a multimodal intervention and a guideline to assist in management.https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/PMR.2020.0005attitudesfatigueexercisepalliative carepalliative medicinequality of life |
| spellingShingle | Gemma Ingham Katalin Urban How Confident Are We at Assessing and Managing Fatigue in Palliative Care Patients? A Multicenter Survey Exploring the Current Attitudes of Palliative Care Professionals Palliative Medicine Reports attitudes fatigue exercise palliative care palliative medicine quality of life |
| title | How Confident Are We at Assessing and Managing Fatigue in Palliative Care Patients? A Multicenter Survey Exploring the Current Attitudes of Palliative Care Professionals |
| title_full | How Confident Are We at Assessing and Managing Fatigue in Palliative Care Patients? A Multicenter Survey Exploring the Current Attitudes of Palliative Care Professionals |
| title_fullStr | How Confident Are We at Assessing and Managing Fatigue in Palliative Care Patients? A Multicenter Survey Exploring the Current Attitudes of Palliative Care Professionals |
| title_full_unstemmed | How Confident Are We at Assessing and Managing Fatigue in Palliative Care Patients? A Multicenter Survey Exploring the Current Attitudes of Palliative Care Professionals |
| title_short | How Confident Are We at Assessing and Managing Fatigue in Palliative Care Patients? A Multicenter Survey Exploring the Current Attitudes of Palliative Care Professionals |
| title_sort | how confident are we at assessing and managing fatigue in palliative care patients a multicenter survey exploring the current attitudes of palliative care professionals |
| topic | attitudes fatigue exercise palliative care palliative medicine quality of life |
| url | https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/PMR.2020.0005 |
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