Assessing and Managing Symptoms in Palliative Care University of Stirling

Overview

Palliative care offers care and support to individuals, and those close to them, with a wide range of life limiting conditions, including: cancers; end-stage cardiac, respiratory and renal disease; multiple sclerosis and dementia. Due to this, palliative care should be multi-disciplinary and provided at a generalist and specialist level across all areas of health and social care.

Assessing and Managing Symptoms in Palliative Care at University of Stirling will further your education into this area to achieve the aim of supporting the palliative care needs of everyone. The focus will be on the management of the wide range of physical, psychological, social and spiritual needs, core to effective palliative care will be explored.

The module considers the principles of palliative care, multidisciplinary working, systematic assessment and management of key symptoms.

This module explores ways to assess and manage physical, psychological, social and spiritual symptoms experienced by individuals with life-limiting illnesses.

Objectives

• Demonstrate a critical understanding of the key concepts associated with multi-professional assessment of symptoms in palliative care;
• Critically explore and evaluate assessment tools applied to symptom management in palliative care;
• Analyse the Biopsychosocial model of care as a framework for the symptom management in patients with palliative care needs;
• Demonstrate an in-depth knowledge of the psychological, pharmacological and supportive care measures incorporated in the assessment and management of specific symptoms in the individual with palliative care needs.