Advance Care Planning Conversations: Laying the Foundation for Goal-Concordant Care at End of Life.

The delivery of culturally congruent, person-centered, family-focused quality care requires an exploration of the values, beliefs, and preferences of those we serve [13]. Nuanced advance care planning conversations lay the foundation for shared decision making and promotes the delivery of goal-concordant care. This chapter will provide clinicians with guidance and resources to aid this process with a focus on contextualized communication with those with serious illness.

Trauma-Informed Care for Inpatient Palliative Care Social Work: Applying Existing Models at the Bedside.

Coexisting serious illness and posttraumatic stress place hospitalized individuals at risk for complex pain, anxiety, and retraumatization. Hospital palliative care social workers increasingly recognize the value of trauma-informed care (TIC) for reducing harm in the inpatient setting. Despite this recognition, there is limited operationalization of TIC principles for inpatient interventions. This paper integrates each TIC principle with inpatient psychosocial interventions to advance trauma-informed competencies among inpatient palliative care social workers and to provide a foundation for future TIC implementation research.

When Ambiguous Loss Becomes Ambiguous Grief: Clinical Work with Bereaved Dementia Caregivers.

The experience of caring for someone with dementia can be heartbreaking. The losses inherent to caregiving itself can be difficult to reconcile after the death of a person with dementia, causing challenges in the bereavement stage. Although there is often significant social support to help people process the death of someone close to them, clinicians can struggle to help bereaved dementia caregivers integrate their ambiguous losses from caregiving, such as loss of roles, functions, and relationships, into a postdeath bereavement process. Many socioeconomic, personality, and family functioning factors impact an individual caregiver's experience, and there are more global influences from the nature of dementia caregiving itself that must be understood to best support a caregiver. Using the lens of the dementia grief model and examples from a case study, this article seeks to illustrate the dynamics inherent in integrating ambiguous losses following the death of a person from dementia, and it proposes clinical goals for working effectively with this population.