Counselling Skills in Palliative Care

This book is for people working in palliative care, helping patients and families to manage and live with chronic and progressive illnesses where treatment is no longer aimed at a cure. Palliative care professionals are encouraged to work holistically, viewing themselves and their relationships with patients as significant therapeutic resources in their own right. The authors argue that sensitive counselling skills need to be used effectively by all palliative workers, not just by counsellors. The book discusses the place of counselling skills using an integrative biopsychosocial model of family systems medicine, taking into account interactions between family life cycles, social conceptions of illness and treatment, the psychosocial typology of particular diseases, and family/professional belief systems. Each chapter considers counselling skills in relation to the overall care system (including the professional team and the family), not just the patient with the disease. Ideas are explored through clinical vignettes of common scenarios in palliative care.