Family Hospice Care: Pre-Planning & Care Guide

Author: Harry van Bommel
ISBN #: 1-55307-002-X
Publisher: Resources Supporting Family and Community Legacies Inc.

“I Don’t Know What to Say…”

How to Help and Support Someone who is Dying
Author: Dr. Robert Buckman
ISBN #: 1-55013-092-7
Publisher: Key Porter Books

Summary:
“When people we love are dying, we all too often are unable to help them—or even talk to them—about impending loss. The authoritative and empathetic guide offers practical advice for the friends and families of the terminally ill”

What Dying People Want: Practical Wisdom for the End of Life

Author: David Kuhl (M.D.)
ISBN #: 0-385-65883-4
Publisher: DoubleDay Canada

Summary:
“In What Dying People Want, an internationally renowned palliative care physician offers a profound and practical book about living with a terminal illness. Dr. David Kuhl provides guidance, solace, and helpful strategies for people who are terminally ill and their families and caregivers”

Choices for People who Have a Terminal Illness, Their Families and Their Caregivers (3rd revised edition)

Author: Harry van Bommel
ISBN #: 1-55021-054-8
Publisher: New Canada Publications

Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs and Communications of the Dying

Author: Maggie Callanan & Patricia Kelley
ISBN #: 0-553-56139-1
Publisher: Bantam Books

Summary:
“For more than a decade hospice nurses, Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley have tended the terminally ill. Now, in this moving and compassionate book, they share their intimate experiences with patients at the end of life”

Palliative Care Consultations Primary and Metastatic Brain Tumours

Author: Sara Booth, Eduardo Bruera
ISBN #: 978-0-19-852807-4
Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary:
There are few more distressing problems for patients and families than the development of a primary or secondary brain tumour.  Treatment is often palliative through intensive, from the start.  Little firm evidence exists to guide the physician in caring for patients with seizures refractory to standard treatment.  Most of the work is based on case reports or personal experience.  

Boundaries and Self Care

Author: Elizabeth Causton
ISBN #: 978-0-9739828-8-6

Summary:
 Elizabeth speaks about the importance of self care for all individuals working in hospice palliative care. She discusses useful strategies for identifying and preventing burnout for yourself and co-workers.

Living with Dying

Authors: Don Trapnell and Deanna Hutchings
ISBN #: 97809739828-9-3

Summary:
Don Trapnell and Deanna Hutchings candidly explore their experiences living with Don's terminal diagnosis. They are thoughtful, articulate and insightful in this one hour documentary of their journey so far.  

Essentials in Hospice Palliative Care; Second Edition

Author: Katherine Murray
ISBN #: 978-0973982817

Summary:
An excellent resource for palliative caregivers - including family, community health workers, resident care assistants, nurses and anyone else wanting a solid foundation in this important area. The Essentials manual engages readers with warmth and heart. It provides caregivers with the necessary resources and tools to understand key issues in the dying process. Essentials extends our understanding of how to provide excellent care for the dying, by teaching strategies to: Enhance comfort through palliation and simple comfort measures. Be "up close and personal" with the dying. Deal with the psychosocial implications of physical changes in last days and hours. Develop supportive strategies for both patients and "family." Engage with the challenge of "being with" instead of "doing for."  Enhance your understanding of the nature of grief. * Strengthen communication skills and avoid common roadblocks. Support children who are living with dying by understanding the essential principles of how to talk about death with kids, what to say, and when to say it. * Care for yourself by applying a strength based model of self care.

Meditations from a Hospice Bed

Author: Gary Woolsey (With Reflections by Marie Woolsey)
ISBN #: 978-0-9920228-1-5
Publisher: Silver Fox Publishing

Summary:
Bishop Gary Woolsey, in his 71st year, was enjoying a life of retirement when a Stage 4 Glioblastoma brain tumour brought him to an abrupt halt! Surgery left him bed-ridden and paralyzed on his left side. After moving to a hospice, with the realization that his life would be cut short, he embarked on his final series of writings. Drawing on his wisdom and experience from 46 years of ministry, Bishop Woolsey wrote Meditations from a Hospice Bed with his iPad propped on his lap, using a stylus in his good right hand. And so, we travel with him in joy and sorrow, tears and laughter, on an emotional journey homeward. His wife, Marie, writes insightful reflections on each meditation, adding a glimpse of her own journey - that of a caregiver preparing for an unknown future  

Being Mortal

Author: Atul Gawande
ISBN-10: 0385677006
ISBN-13: 978-0385677004
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
 

Summary:
Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.  Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients’ anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them. And families go along with all of it.    In his bestselling books, Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon, has fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession. Now he examines its ultimate limitations and failures—in his own practices as well as others’—as life draws to a close. And he discovers how we can do better. He follows a hospice nurse on her rounds, a geriatrician in his clinic, and reformers turning nursing homes upside down. He finds people who show us how to have the hard conversations and how to ensure we never sacrifice what people really care about.    Riveting, honest, and humane, Being Mortal shows that the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life—all the way to the very end.