Journal of Palliative Care & Medicine
Open Access

Review Article

Adolescents and Young Adults (AYAs) Transition into Palliative Care: A Narrative Analysis of Family Member's Stories of Place of Death

School of Health and Human Sciences, Southern Cross University, PO Box 157, Lismore, NSW, Australia

*Corresponding Author:

Dr. Janet Anne Barling
School of Health and Human Sciences
Southern Cross University, PO Box 157
Lismore, NSW, Australia
E-mail: jan.barling@scu.edu.au

Received date: August 20, 2012; Accepted date: September 25, 2012; Published date: September 27, 2012

Citation: Barling JA, Stevens JA, Davis KM (2012) Adolescents and Young Adults (AYAs) Transition into Palliative Care: A Narrative Analysis of Family Member’s Stories of Place of Death. J Palliative Care Med 2:130. doi:10.4172/2165-7386.1000130

Copyright: © 2012 Barling JA, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) cancer patients have been described as being orphaned in the system. A major study, investigated the experiences of family members who had an adolescents or young adult who lived with and eventually died of cancer. The participants were a self-selected purposeful sample of 26 family members. Selected methods of narrative analysis were used to create themes in a meta-narrative of the family member’s experience. One of the themes to emerge from the families meta- narrative was the change in the focus of care. Six of the family member’s stories spoke of the palliative care transition. Specific to this was the experience of the transition to place of death with particular reference to dying at home. The results suggest that the transition into palliative should occur sooner rather than later for appropriate supports to be in place to facilitate this transition.

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