What's in the Syringe?: Principles of Early Integrated Palliative Care

What's in the Syringe? offers a succinct overview of the psychological skills of outpatient palliative care, teaching clinicians how to help patients live well and acknowledge end of life as patients meet five challenges of serious illness. It explores how to help patients develop prognostic awareness, through which they pair hopes and worries and see themselves with clarity and empathy. The book also teaches clinicians how to support patients' coping skills. As patients use these skills, they improve their quality of life and deepen their prognostic awareness, helping them make informed medical and personal decisions as they approach end of life. Illustrated, case-based chapters are organized from diagnosis to end of life and draw on two decades of research and clinical experience. Each chapter describes how palliative care and oncology clinicians can collaborate and explains the interpretive role of the palliative care clinician in helping the patient and oncologist understand each other. What's in the Syringe? is an essential resource for palliative care fellows, trainees, and clinicians, for oncologists, primary care clinicians, and medical students, and for all care providers working with patients facing serious illness.

Dr. Juliet Jacobsen is an interventionalist for the Cancer Outcomes Research Team's palliative care studies, including the landmark NEJM study. She has worked with colleagues to define and describe the clinical work of early integrated palliative care and designed curricula for interventionalists.

Dr. Jackson is a Palliative Care physician who, with her colleagues, has developed and refined the theoretical and clinical basis of the early integrated palliative care model, defining the intervention, and establishing best practices.

Dr. Greer is a Clinical Psychologist who has worked with colleagues to evaluate the impact of the early integrated palliative care model on outcomes for patients with advanced lung cancer. This led to rigorous analyses of patient-reported data that validated the interventions designed by Palliative Care colleagues.

When Dr. Temel began oncology training, palliative care was practiced exclusively in the hospital setting through inpatient palliative care consultative models or in the home with hospice care. Because palliative care interactions were often brief, intermittent and occurred late in the course of illness, many patients with serious cancers and their family members were left struggling to address their physical and psychological symptoms as well as to understand and cope with their illness. Dr. Temel worked with senior colleagues to develop, implement, and study an outpatient palliative care model that would enable patients with advanced lung cancer to receive early palliative care integrated with their oncology care.