ISSN: 1758-1907

Diabetes Management

End Of Life Care Impact Factor

While dying is a normal part of life, death is often treated as an illness. As a consequence, many people die in hospitals, alone and in pain.Palliative care focuses primarily on anticipating, preventing, dig-nosing, and treating symptoms experienced by patients with a serious or life-threatening illness and helping patients and their families make medically important decisions. The ultimate goal of palliative care is to improve quality of life for both the patient and the family, regardless of diagnosis. Although palliative care, unlike hospice care, does not depend on prognosis, as the end of life approaches, the role of palliative care intensifies and focuses on aggressive symptom management and psychosocial support. Helping patients and their families understand the nature of illness and prognosis is a crucial aspect of palliative care near the end of life. Additionally, palliative care specialists help patients and their families to determine appropriate medical care and to align the patient’s care goals with those of the healthcare team. Finally, establishing the need for a medical proxy, advance directives, and resuscitation status is an integral part of palliative care at the end of life the traditional medical treatment model has become dichotomous, leading physicians to provide curative or aggressive treatment initially and to initiate comfort care only when other measures have failed. Palliative medicine establishes goals to relieve suffering in all stages of disease and is not limited to comfort care or end-of-life care. The terms palliative care and hospice care are sometimes used interchangeably. According to the National Quality Forum, hospice care is a service delivery system that provides palliative care/medicine when life expectancy is 6 months or less and when curative or life-prolonging therapy is no longer indicated. Therefore, it is important to distinguish that although hospice provides palliative care, palliative care is not hospice. Not all available therapeutic palliative care modalities are provided within the hospice service delivery system.  

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