Life and Death Matters - Vocabulary Flashcards
Self-awareness and Personal Baggage
- Prepare to care: consciously acknowledge beliefs, values and experiences; align care with the person’s beliefs, values and experiences.
- Personal baggage: values, ideas, hopes, fears, dreams, biases and beliefs that you bring to caregiving.
- PSWs: baggage is neither good nor bad; carrying baggage means you are human.
- Reflect and pack light: reflect on where you are going and who you are going with; what this means in caregiving.
- Developing self-awareness: helps sort baggage, acknowledge values and beliefs, and decide what might interfere with providing excellent care.
- After reflection: you will hear the words and feelings behind the dying person’s words and be more present to their needs.
- With self-awareness: you can respect others’ spiritual and cultural practices and provide emotional support.
- Appropriate death: good and bad are subjective; use the term appropriate death when referring to someone else’s preferences.
Cultural Safety and Safe Environment
- Collaborating with the team to build a safe environment for health care includes: cultural safety, addressing systemic bias and racism, and developing a trauma-informed approach.
- Competency touchstone: assess and address needs unique to each person and family, considering ethnicity, culture, gender, sexual orientation, religion, language, age, ability and preferences; integrate these into care.
- Culture definition: the ideas, customs and social behaviours of a particular people or society; lack of understanding can create barriers in accessing care.
- PSW role in culturally safe care: advocate for culturally safe care; with cultural safety, a person feels heard and respected; focus on Indigenous culture but applicable to all cultures.
- Components of Cultural Safety: Cultural Safety, Cultural Sensitivity, Cultural Humility, Cultural Awareness, and Safety.
- Cultural Humility: empowers the dying person and family; their answers are as valid as those of the medical team.
- Cultural Awareness: acknowledges your own cultural values and perceptions; asks why we do things a certain way.
- Cultural Sensitivity: equalizes power between cultures; values differ, none is better or worse.
- Cultural Competence: lifelong commitment to honouring and respecting; acknowledge biases; gather information from the person about their cultural values and protocols and incorporate into caregiving.
- Indigenous Wellness Framework: mental wellness creates meaning; physical wellness creates purpose; emotional wellness creates belonging; spiritual wellness creates hope.
- Two-Eyed Seeing: urban Indigenous lived experience often between Indigenous and Western cultures, in a third space in-between.
- Addressing systemic racism and bias: example case Brian Sinclair, an Indigenous man who waited 34 hours in ER and died without receiving timely treatment.
- Cultural Touchstone: PSWs reflect on personal and systemic biases and advocate for culturally safe practices free of racism and discrimination.
Best Practices in Palliative Care
- What is a best practice? A way of completing a task that always gives the desired result.
- Best practices in palliative care: practices and approaches that enable you and the team to provide excellent care as determined by the person and family.
- Best practices are grouped into 3 categories: 1 Expanding your world view, 2 Building skills in connecting and communicating, 3 Developing best practice ways of being.
1. Expanding your world view
- Health care providers who deliver excellent palliative care see every person as valuable and deserving of care: see the person, hear the person, interact with the person.
- Supporting every person’s dignity: the Dignity Question asks what you need to know about the person to give the best care possible.
2. Building Skills in Connecting and Communicating
- Connecting builds trust and communicates value and respect.
- Skills: Listening, Pausing, Asking open-ended questions, Being silent, Responding with curiosity, Avoiding roadblocks to communication.
- Listening: listen with the sole intention of hearing the person.
- Pausing: take a moment before responding; helps the person feel validated.
- Open-ended questions: ask for more information and clarification.
- Offering silence: support through silence when appropriate.
- Being there with a person: good communication that includes silence is an art.
- Responding with curiosity: essential to person-centered, culturally safe care.
- Avoiding roadblocks: avoid minimizing the problem, false reassurance, excessive praise, or platitudes.
3. Developing Best Practice Ways of Being
- Focus on strengths and not judging: look for strengths in the person and the family.
- Maintaining hope: hope evolves with different life experiences; PSWs can foster hope.
- Being empathetic and compassionate: empathy is the ability to see and feel another person’s perspective and emotions.
Boundaries and Professional Practice
- Maintaining therapeutic boundaries: boundaries are the invisible edges of a relationship; space you do not cross.
- Boundaries support emotional availability and respect family relationships; example of treating my mom like your mom but recognizing she is their mom.
- Why boundaries matter: PSWs provide the majority of direct care and may form close relationships; you may be asked to perform tasks not assigned.
- With unclear boundaries you may feel strong emotions, ownership, or a need to fix problems.
- The Fix-it Trap: some suffering cannot be fixed; learn to be with suffering without trying to fix it.
- How to maintain boundaries: 1 Acknowledge the importance of boundaries, 2 Know the scope of your job, 3 Reflect on situations with strong emotions, 4 Engage in regular self-care.
Advocacy and Team Collaboration
- What is an advocate? Someone who speaks up for or on behalf of another person.
- Ways PSWs advocate: clarify information to clear up misconceptions, connect the person with assistance, identify resources needed when people advocate for themselves.
- Strategies for advocating: be confident, be professional, be prepared, be clear, be descriptive, be positive, be thankful for assistance.
Trauma-Informed Approach
- Integrate trauma-informed practices to care to ensure safety, trust, choice, collaboration and empowerment for patients and families.
- Two-Eyed Seeing fosters integration of Indigenous and Western knowledge in care.
Indigenous Wellness Framework
- Mental wellness creates meaning; physical wellness creates purpose; emotional wellness creates belonging; spiritual wellness creates hope.
- Expressions: mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects reflect identity, values, family, community, and relationships.
Addressing Systemic Racism and Bias in Health Care
- Acknowledge and address systemic racism and bias in health care to improve access and quality of care for Indigenous and other populations.
Summary of Key Concepts
- Prepare to care by recognizing and managing personal baggage.
- Provide culturally safe care by addressing bias, racism and trauma, and by expanding your worldview.
- Use best practices that expand worldview, enhance communication, and guide being.
- Maintain boundaries to protect both clients and caregivers while remaining empathetic.
- Advocate for clients and collaborate with the team to ensure culturally safe and equitable care.