| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔英科技大學 === 護理系碩士班 === 103 === Medical care nowadays not only includes the cares of the newborn, the elderly, the illness and the death, but also emphasizes a comprehensive and sustainable end-of-life care. When addressing end-of-life challenges, “family meetings” is the most common approach holding by the medical team, terminally-ill cancer patients and their
significant others. However, evidence-based literature reviews are not available at present due to the lack of inquiries of family meetings in domestic medical care system. Therefore, in this study we investigated current states of domestic family meetings by using content analysis to summarize the data and interpret the results.The study results indicated that there were five types of family meetings such as “truth telling and prognosis”, “hospice/palliative care and do-not-resuscitate (DNR)”, “the goals of the end-of-life”, “discharge planning and care tips” and “artificial nutrition” to address seventeen issues, including “(the medical team) how to give an ultimatum and set the bottom line”, “(the medical team) how to be neutral and ask the significant others to make decisions”, “(the medical team) how to defense against challenges”, “(the physician
) how to make the claims to the medical authority (of the medical team)”,“(terminally-ill cancer patients and their significant others) the fear of making wrong decisions”
, “(terminally-ill cancer patients and their significant others) evaded the challenges due to their lack of abilities to make decisions and thus passed the buck to the medical teams”, “(terminally-ill cancer patients and their significant others) the significant others alienated the terminal cancer patients from the medical teams and evaded mutual communications”, “(terminally-ill cancer patients and their significant others)entrusted themselves to the medical teams due to their confidence in the team”, “be concerned about current challenges and looked for consolations”, “left the fate to God and prayed for rest-in-peace”, “sorrowed over their end-of-lives and left no means untried”, “be reluctant to give up, but eventually compromised due to sympathies”, “felt powerless, money is crucial and inevitable”, “sought for medical treatments out of love, even had to be in debt”, “the selection of home- or institution-based care depended on the availability of manpower”, “the pros and cons of intravenous supplements or nasogastric feedings”, “the existence of alternate day fasting diet”. By providing current situations and the contents of domestic family meetings to clinical medical staffs, we expect that the nursing quality of the medical teams toward terminally-ill cancer patients and their significant others can be greatly improved.
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