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Aging, Spirituality and Palliative Care

• No Author/Editor data available

• Price: $39.95
• Binding: Paperback (also available in Hardback)
• Pages: 286
• Published by: Routledge
• Publication Date: 19th October 2006
• ISBN: 978-0-7890-3342-0

About the Book

Gain greater depth of understanding of end-of-life spiritual issues for older adults

The period of time when a person approaches death is always difficult both for the patient and the caregiver. Aging, Spirituality, and Palliative Care discusses best practices in aged and palliative care while addressing patients’ diverse spiritual needs. Leading authorities’ presentations from the Third International Conference on Ageing and Spirituality in Adelaide, Australia, in 2004 explore practical, sensitive spiritual approaches to help older patients deal with aging, illness, and approaching death.

Aging, Spirituality, and Palliative Care carefully examines what can be the most spiritually meaningful time in the life of an aging person—confronting illness and death. Though they may be unafraid of dying, older people many times fear the pain and suffering that may accompany it. The process of dying is presented with care and reverence, while providing effective approaches to increase comfort, spirituality, and quality of life. Each chapter is extensively referenced, and many include tables and figures that enhance understanding of research data.

Topics in Aging, Spirituality, and Palliative Care include:

• helping older people to ’sustain the self’ to allow them freedom to do personal spiritual work
  
• helping patients cope with changing circumstances
  
• providing a sense of direction
  
• the opposition of spiritual values by contemporary social policy
  
• caring for each person as an ’ensouled body’ and ’embodied soul’
  
• assessing spiritual needs
  
• a positive approach to dementia
  
• spiritual reminiscence as exploration of life meanings
  
• study comparison of traditional religiousness versus de-institutionalized spiritual seeking
  
• the pain associated with dying—and spirituality’s place in it
  
• addressing the multiple aspects of suffering
  
• clowning as care of the spirit
  
• Buddhist and Christian approaches to understanding aging, death, and spirituality
  
• caregivers adapting to the world of the patient
  
• the spiritual aspect of palliative care in residential aged care
  
• personal competence and operational competence in student learning
  
• intimate, professional, and communal fidelity
  
  

Aging, Spirituality, and Palliative Care is meaningful, valuable reading for chaplains, pastoral workers, palliative care providers, social care providers, nurses, diversional therapists, and other workers who care for the aged.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
  
• Preface
  
• PART I
  
• Ageing Health Care and the Spiritual Imperative: A View from Scotland (Harriet Mowat)
  
• Continuity, Spiritual Growth, and Coping in Later Adulthood (Robert C. Atchley)
  
• The Spirituality of Compassion: A Public Health Response to Ageing and End-of-Life Care (Bruce Rumbold)
  
• Disembodied Souls or Soul-Less Bodies: Spirituality as Fragmentation (Rosalie Hudson)
  
• Spiritual Care: Recognizing Spiritual Needs of Older Adults (Elizabeth MacKinlay)
  
• Helping the Flame to Stay Bright: Celebrating the Spiritual in Dementia (John Killick)
  
• “I Am Just an Ordinary Person…”: Spiritual Reminiscence in Older People with Memory Loss (Corinne Trevitt and Elizabeth MacKinlay)
  
• Who Is Afraid of Death? Religiousness, Spirituality, and Death Anxiety in Late Adulthood (Paul Wink)
  
• The Pain of Dying (Michael Barbato)
  
• Suffering—At the Bedside of the Dying (David Currow and Meg Hegarty)
  
• Joy in the Midst of Suffering: Clowning as Care of the Spirit in Palliative Care (Jenny Thompson-Richards)
  
• Ageing and Death: A Buddhist-Christian Conceptual Framework for Spirituality in Later Life (Ruwan Palapathwala)
  
• The ’Connection’ Health Care Providers Make with Dying Patients (Ann Harrington)
  
• PART II
  
• A Palliative Approach to Spirituality in Residential Aged Care (Linda Kristjanson)
  
• Learning to Be a Professional: Two Models of Competence and Related Learning Strategies (Laurie Grealish)
  
• “Till Death Us Do Part”: Issues of Fidelity in End of Life Care (Margaret O’Connor and Susan Lee)
  
• Index
  
• Reference Notes Included