Hearts above water: Palliative care during a pandemic. Article

Currin-McCulloch, Jennifer, Chapman, Brooke, Carson, Colleen et al. (2021). Hearts above water: Palliative care during a pandemic. . SOCIAL WORK IN HEALTH CARE, 60(1), 93-105. 10.1080/00981389.2021.1885562

cited authors

  • Currin-McCulloch, Jennifer; Chapman, Brooke; Carson, Colleen; Fundalinski, Kathleen; Hays, Magan; Budai, Peggy; Kaushik, Shivani

abstract

  • Social workers and nurses, as members of interprofessional palliative medicine teams, faced unfamiliar challenges and opportunities as they endeavored to provide humanistic care to patients and families during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Typical methods for engaging patients and families in medical decision-making became thwarted by visitation restrictions and patients' dramatic health declines. This paper presents an innovative social work and nursing intervention aimed at enhancing humanistic patient/family care and advanced directive dialogs. Through incorporating a narrative synthesis of the teams' reflective journals from COVID-19, the paper chronicles the intervention implementation, patient/family responses, and team members' personal and professional meaning-making processes.

publication date

  • January 1, 2021

published in

keywords

  • COVID-19
  • Humans
  • Nursing Staff, Hospital
  • Palliative Care
  • Pandemics
  • SARS-CoV-2
  • Social Work
  • Trauma Centers

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

Medium

  • Print-Electronic

start page

  • 93

end page

  • 105

volume

  • 60

issue

  • 1