Palliative care

Rare card · No. 38065

Palliative care (from Latin root palliare "to cloak") is an interdisciplinary medical care-giving approach aimed at optimizing quality of life and mitigating or reducing suffering among people with serious, complex, and often terminal illnesses. Many definitions of palliative care exist. The World Health Organization (WHO) describes palliative care as: [A]n approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial, and spiritual. Since the 1990s, many palliative care programs involved a disease-specific approach. However, as the field developed throughout the 2000s, the WHO began to take a broader patient-centered approach, suggesting that the principles of palliative care should be applied as early as possible to any chronic, ultimately fatal...

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