| acute care | The use of aggressive medical techniques to diagnose illness or injury, relieve symptoms, provide treatment, and sustain life.
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| burnout | A reaction to stress in which a caregiver goes beyond the state of exhaustion and depression to "past caring."
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| caregiver stress | A category of stress related to frequent exposure to suffering and multiple losses, as well as to nonreciprocal giving, excessive demands, feelings of inadequacy at inability to provide cure, and institutional constraints.
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| chronic illness | An illness of long duration or frequent recurrence.
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| depersonalization | An aspect of the scientific method applied in medicine which results in focusing more on the disease than on the patient.
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| diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) | A program of reimbursement for medical care that makes use of a predetermined schedule of fees for various services provided to patients.
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| elder care | Comprehensive care for chronically ill older adults, which can range from limited assistance with independent living to supervised, institutional care in a variety of settings.
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| gerontology | The study of older people and the processes of aging.
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| home care | Medically supervised or supportive care provided in a person's home.
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| hospice care | A program of health care oriented toward the needs of dying patients and their families in which the emphasis is placed on comforting the patient rather than curing a disease.
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| hospital | A medical institution designed to provide short-term intensive care of patients.
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| institutional neurosis | In routinized and bureaucratic environments, the increasing dependence of residents on staff for even mundane needs and the erosion of their unique personality traits.
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| interventional cascade | The use of multiple sophisticated medical technologies to sustain life and delay death.
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| life review | A review of the course of one's life, including past relationships and significant events, resulting in the possibility of discussing existential concerns and completing unfinished business.
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| life-threatening illness | An illness that potentially may cause the patient's death.
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| managed care | Efforts to control where, when, and from whom medical services can be obtained by standardizing policies and procedures to reduce costs.
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| Medicare Hospice Benefit | A legal provision enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1982 whereby qualifying for hospice care requires a doctor's certification that a patient's life expectancy is six months or less if the illness runs its normal course.
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| nursing home | A medical facility designed to provide long-term residential and supportive care for patients whose illness does not require acute, intensive care.
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| palliative care | The active total care of patients whose disease is not responsive to curative treatment; emphasizes healing of the person and relief of distressing symptoms rather than curing of a disease.
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| peaceful death | The aim of an approach to end-of-life care in which successful management of pain and other distressing symptoms, along with provision of emotional and spiritual support, allows a patient to live as fully as possible until the end of life.
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| primary caregiver | An individual who is available on a more or less full-time basis to provide home care for a patient. This may be the patient's spouse, partner, parent, other relative, or someone hired by a family or funded by a public agency to carry out such duties.
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| quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) | A concept associated with health care rationing that aims for a balance or trade-off between the length of life and quality of life whereby a person might equate the prospect of living fewer years in perfect health with the prospect of living more years in less-than-perfect health.
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| rationing | In health care, the allocation of scarce medical resources among competing individuals or groups; occurs when not all care expected to be beneficial is provided to all patients, usually because of cost; also known as lifeboat ethics.
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| respite care | Temporary care that allows family members or other caregivers a break in caring for a patient.
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| skilled nursing facility | A health care institution designed to provide a comprehensive level of non-acute care, including medical and nursing services as well as dietary supervision.
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| technological imperative | The belief or practice that sophisticated medical technologies should always be used to combat disease with relatively little concern about costs or potentially adverse side effects.
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| terminal illness | An illness defined as having no known cure and likely to result in death.
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| total care | A personal and comprehensive approach to medical care that attends not only to a patient's physical needs, but also to his or her mental, emotional, and spiritual needs; also known as whole patient care.
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| trauma/emergency care | Care for accidental injuries and other physically threatening conditions that require immediate medical intervention to sustain life or well-being.
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| triage | A method of responding to emergencies that aims to reduce time between injury and treatment by assigning priorities to patients based on the seriousness of their injuries; lower priority is assigned to patients with only a remote chance of survival and those with minor injuries while higher priority is given to patients whose injuries are serious but survivable.
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