Barbara Monroe – författare

Patient participation and user involvement are central to current thinking about the effective delivery of desired healthcare outcomes. Working with the person who lies behind every patient is core to palliative care. A voice can only become significant when it is listened to and acted upon. With palliative care increasingly addressing the needs of people with a variety of conditions in a range of settings, as well as with advances in research, technology, and information, the challenge to be 'a voice for the voiceless' is greater than ever.This book addresses key aspects in the provision of patient-centred palliative care and tracks significant developments in user involvement. It sets the philosophy within the cultural, social and political context of modern healthcare, particularly addressing issues of quality, standards, education and bereavement. A key component in the delivery of high quality palliative care is the multi-professional team. Following a discussion of teamwork, five core professions present a critical analysis of their working practices. The book concludes with a commentary from a palliative care user and a bereaved carer.It is often somewhat glibly asserted that the patient is, or should be, at the centre of care. There have been few attempts to examine how to keep him or her there without professional needs and protocols crowding him or her out. This book asks how we listen and why we listen. The book focuses on the challenges of how professionals can keep the needs of the patient central in clinical care and how the patient can influence the direction of that care.

The first book of its kind, Resilience and Palliative Care - Achievement in adversity takes the increasing international literature on resilience and applies it to palliative and end-of-life care. The book offers an overview of all key aspects of palliative care, presented through a resilience perspective. Why do some patients and families break down while others surmounts the challenges facing them? What interventions strengthen individual, family and community coping? This book aims to facilitate change with people facing the crisis of death, dying and bereavement. Much of the existing literature has focused on risk, problems and vulnerability; the emerging concept of resilience focuses on strengths and possibilities.The 'total pain'/'total care' approach pioneered by Dame Cicely Saunders and St Christopher's Hospice now needs reinterpreting in the light of changing contexts and challenges. The realities of demographic change and resource-constrained health and social care environments have generated an increasingly risk focused approach to service delivery. A narrowly medicalised approach has inevitable limitations; professional care alone will be unable to meet need and demand in the face of ageing populations, changing patterns of illness and the need for equity. The resilience approach offers a counterbalance that harnesses the strengths of individuals and the communities in which they live and in which most of their dying will take place. Resilience thinking emphasises the importance of public health and creates a partnership between patients, professionals and community structures, seeking to build community capacity and to deliver a preventive health care that will leave future generations less afraid of the dying and bereavement that will confront all of us.This book offers insights into how, at all levels of planning and delivering palliative care, there is the opportunity to maximise coping, build an infrastructure for self-help, and increase the capacity of strengthened teams and organisations.

Recent years have seen increasing interest in the needs of children facing bereavement, and a corresponding increase in services to support them. This book addresses and explains the theoretical concepts and practical implications behind the idea of brief work with bereaved children and families. Flexible and accessible short term services delivered at the right time underpin the strengths of bereaved children, supporting their recovery rather than pathologising the grief process. In this way the book also speaks to the current interest in the concept of resilience and working with families' strengths and possibilities, rather than merely identifying their problems.This second edition continues to be a unique book within the growing filed of childhood bereavement, and the new chapters added to this edition discuss managing situations with learning disability, supporting very young children and emotional literacy. The book also presents cases from the service user's perspective. It looks at different approaches to intervention, such as the importance of assessment and the value of groupwork, and also covers work with children and families before a death.Brief interventions with bereaved children will appeal to practitioners, educators and service providers managing scarce resources. The editors have more than twenty-five years experience as practitioners within the field, as service providers and educators. The book features chapters from distinguished contributors with backgrounds in healthcare, education, social work and the police, alongside theoretical and practice-based chapters from workers in the field of bereavement care for children.

Society has become increasingly diverse; multi-cultural, multi-faith and wide ranging in family structures. The wealthier are healthier and social inequalities are more pronounced. Respecting and working with the range of 'differences' among service users, families and communities in health and social care with ill, dying and bereaved people is a neglected area in the literature. As the principles of palliative and end of life care increasingly permeate the mainstream of health and social care services, it is important that professionals are sensitive and respond to the differing needs of individuals from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicities, beliefs, abilities and sexual orientations, as well as to the different contexts and social environments in which people live and die. This book explores what underpins inequality, disadvantage and injustice in access to good end of life care. Increasingly clinicians, policy planners, and academics are concerned about inequity in service provision. Internationally, there is an increasing focus and sense of urgency both on delivering good care in all settings regardless of diagnosis, and on better meeting the needs of vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. National initiatives emphasise the importance of resolving disparities in care and harnessing empowered user voices to drive change. This newly expanded, fully revised second edition, with 11 new chapters, provides a comprehensive analysis of discrimination, difference and disadvantage in end of life care, and offers practical guidance for all who seek to support the equitable provision of good end of life care.

Language and Literacy Series As communities on ""the other side"" of the digital divide become immersed in electronic media, how can we evaluate their experiences to transform the teaching of writing and improve student learning? This important book offers a balanced view of instructional technology and critical multiculturalism as experienced in today's public schools.