What is palliative care?
Palliative care is an approach to treatment which aims to:
- Improve the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem of life-threatening illness
- Prevent and relieve suffering
- Identify, assess and treat pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual
- Affirm life and regard dying as a normal process
- Offer a support system to help patients live as actively as possible until death
It is appropriate early in the course of illness, in combination with other therapies that are intended to prolong life, such as chemotherapy or radiation therapy, and includes those investigations needed to better understand and manage distressing clinical complications.