End-of-Life Care focuses on the connected care model as it applies to the final stage of life. This course explores ethnic and cultural factors that affect an individual’s response to death and dying. This course covers planning and implementing ideal interventions to help individuals, families, and groups cope and agree on a common care goal. This course also discusses empathy and compassion in healthcare.

For this task, you will demonstrate why empathy and compassion are critical in health and human services. You will describe how healthcare professionals can demonstrate or practice empathy and compassion and recognize factors that reduce the ability to demonstrate empathy.

Note: All references used should be current, within the last five years.

SCENARIO
Scenario A
A 51-year-old male client has received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. A human services professional from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is speaking with the client and asks the client about his illness while looking directly at the client. The client responds, “I know I am going to die, and I am most concerned about the pain I will have to endure.” The human services professional speaks to the client using active listening and gives the client information about inpatient and home hospice and discusses how both will help control any pain the client will have. The client states, “I don’t think I can go back to a facility where everything is so clinical, and I do not want to be away from my wife.” The professional educates the client about inpatient hospice and tells him that his wife can be with him. The professional supports the client’s decision for home hospice. The client is relieved that he will have his pain controlled and can stay at home with his wife.

Scenario B
A human services professional from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is meeting with a 49-year-old female client who has just visited her oncologist. The oncology office had called the client and asked her to come in immediately, without providing more information. She went into the office, and the receptionist did not look at her but told her that the doctor was running late. The client sat in the waiting room for over an hour. When she was able to see the oncologist, the oncologist spent fewer than 10 minutes telling the client that her breast cancer has advanced and is now stage IV with metastasis to her lungs and liver. She is now terminal. The client was not given time to ask questions and did not understand everything she was told. The oncologist referred her to the human services professional and left the room without any more conversation. The human services professional will assist the client in organizing next steps, setting up appointments, and making plans.
REQUIREMENTS
Your submission must be your original work. No more than a combined total of 30% of the submission and no more than a 10% match to any one individual source can be directly quoted or closely paraphrased from sources, even if cited correctly. The similarity report that is provided when you submit your task can be used as a guide.

You must use the rubric to direct the creation of your submission because it provides detailed criteria that will be used to evaluate your work. Each requirement below may be evaluated by more than one rubric aspect. The rubric aspect titles may contain hyperlinks to relevant portions of the course.

Tasks may not be submitted as cloud links, such as links to Google Docs, Google Slides, OneDrive, etc., unless specified in the task requirements. All other submissions must be file types that are uploaded and submitted as attachments (e.g., .docx, .pdf, .ppt).

Note: All references used should be current, within the last five years.

A. Describe three methods the human services professional used or could have used to demonstrate or practice empathy and compassion in scenario A.
1. Explain the justification for choosing these methods.

B. Describe why empathy and compassion are critical to helping the client at the end of life in scenario B.
1. Explain three methods of compassion the human services professional could use to demonstrate empathy and compassion in scenario B.

C. Identify factors in scenario B that reduce the ability to demonstrate empathy.
1. Explain how those factors might contribute to how the human services professional communicates with the client in scenario B.

D. Acknowledge sources, using in-text citations and references, for content that is quoted, paraphrased, or summarized.

E. Demonstrate professional communication in the content and presentation of your submission.