Report on intership in palliative care Southern Adelaide Palliative Services (South Australia) & Unidade de Cuidados Continuados e Paliativos (Hospital da Luz, Lisboa)

• Autor(a) principal: Pedroso, Ana Carolina Pimenta
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/28761
• topic: Palliative care; Symptom control; Psychosocial approaches; Communication; Death doula; Cuidados paliativos; Controlo sintomático; Abordagem psicossocial; Comunicação; Doula de fim de vida; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Médicas::Ciências da Saúde

My interest in Palliative Care culminated last year in the opportunity of two placements in national and international reference centers. The Unidade de Cuidados Continuados e Paliativos has received me for two months and Southern Adelaide Palliative Services for three. These experiences allowed me to apply on practice the theory learned before and to develop diverse competences, such as: symptomatic control, psychosocial and spiritual approaches, communication with end-of-live patients and their families. During this period, I’ve been immersed in such different health systems, with diverse models of care, that inspired me for me future practice. I’ve had also the opportunity to participate in a research project with CareSearch, which aims to understand the role of the new figure in end-of-life area – death doula – as well as the reasons and context that ended in their appearance. This work made me reflect about the way we care for our patients, opposing to the way they wish to be treated and all the repercussions that this question raises. The statistical analysis is currently being performed and I look forward to contributing to the published article from my work.