Proper palliative care

Palliative care is physical, emotional and spiritual care for a dying person when cure is not possible. It includes compassion and support for family and friends.

Competent palliative care may well be enough to prevent a person feeling any need to contemplate euthanasia.

You matter because you are you. You matter to the last moment of your life and we will do all we can to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die.

Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the modern hospice movement

The key to successful palliative care is to treat the patient as a person, not as a set of symptoms, or medical problems.

The World Health Organisation states that palliative care affirms life and regards dying as a normal process; it neither hastens nor postpones death; it provides relief from pain and suffering; it integrates the psychological and spiritual aspects of the patient.

Making things better for patient, family and friends

The patient's family and friends will need care too. Palliative care aims to enhance the quality of life for the family as well as the patient.

Effective palliative care gives the patient and their loved ones a chance to spend quality time together, with as much distress removed as possible. They can (if they want to) use this time to bring any unfinished business in their lives to a proper closure and to say their last goodbyes.

Palliative care should aim to make it easier and more attractive for family and friends to visit the dying person. A survey (USA 2001) showed that terminally ill patients actually spent the vast majority of their time on their own, with few visits from medical personnel or family members.

Spiritual care

Spiritual care may be important even for non-religious people. Spiritual care should be interpreted in a very wide sense, since patients and families facing death often want to search for the meaning of their lives in their own way.

Palliative care and euthanasia

Good palliative care is the alternative to euthanasia. If it was available to every patient, it would certainly reduce the desire for death to be brought about sooner.

But providing palliative care can be very hard work, both physically and psychologically. Ending a patient's life by injection is quicker and easier and cheaper. This may tempt people away from palliative care.

Legalising euthanasia may reduce the availability of palliative care

Some fear that the introduction of euthanasia will reduce the availability of palliative care in the community, because health systems will want to choose the most cost effective ways of dealing with dying patients.

Medical decision-makers already face difficult moral dilemmas in choosing between competing demands for their limited funds. So making euthanasia easier could exacerbate the slippery slope, pushing people towards euthanasia who may not otherwise choose it.

When palliative care is not enough

Palliative care will not always be an adequate solution:

· Pain: Some doctors estimate that about 5% of patients don't have their pain properly relieved during the terminal phase of their illness, despite good palliative and hospice care

· Dependency: Some patients may prefer death to dependency, because they hate relying on other people for all their bodily functions, and the consequent loss of privacy and dignity

· Lack of home care: Other patients will not wish to have palliative care if that means that they have to die in a hospital and not at home

· Loss of alertness: Some people would prefer to die while they are fully alert and and able to say goodbye to their family; they fear that palliative care would involve a level of pain-killing drugs that would leave them semi-anaesthetised

· Not in the final stages: Other people are grateful for palliative care to a certain point in their disease, but after that would prefer to die rather than live in a state of helplessness and distress, regardless of what is available in terms of pain-killing and comfort.

There should be no law or morality that would limit a clinical team or doctor from administering the frequent dosages of pain medication that are necessary to free people's minds from pain that shrivels the spirit and leaves no time for speaking when, at times, there are very few hours or days left for such communication.

Dr. David Roy, Director of the Centre for Bioethics, Clinical Research Institute of Montreal

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Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1206