Abstract

Palliative Care (PC) is underdeveloped in most parts of the world. PC is based on knowledge inherent to the various specialties, possibilities of clinical and therapeutic intervention in the various areas of medical science knowledge and specific knowledge. The practice of PC should be adapted to each country or region according to relevant aspects such as availability of material and human resources, type of existing health planning, cultural and social aspects of the population served. PC has received very little attention in the field of public health. The probable reasons are that public health’s primary focuses are to prevent illness and premature deaths, and public health professionals may also believe that end-of-life issues are a health system problem rather than a priority to be addressed through population health efforts. With the rapidly aging world population and the associated increase of multiple ‘‘noncommunicable’’ diseases, the need for palliative care will increase dramatically over the next 50 years. Although palliative care services may start in one or more health care organizations that will become centers of PC excellence, it is always important to keep in mind the vision that the process to implement palliative care within a country is striving to integrate palliative care into all levels of the society from the community level upward and from the palliative care expert in the health care system downward. Given this, the creation of Palliative Care teams should be among the priorities of managers, due to the demographic transition and the high demand for palliative care due to the growth of morbidities secondary to chronic degenerative diseases.

Keywords

palliative care, public health, hospices, hospice care, medical science, psychological and spiritual aspects, prorogate death, radiotherapy, clinical situations, sudden death, accident or violence, life-threatening disease, premature death, alleviate pain, human resources