Palliative Care for Cancer Patients

 Palliative care is a type of medical care which is administered at various stages of cancer development process. It is a care that is given for individual who are at verge of death. This care helps in reducing the sufferings of physiological, psychological, social and spiritual issues. This improves the quality of life. Of course, palliative care is a form of anti-cancer treatment. It refers not only to care about disease but also about caring the individual on a whole and his surroundings. Palliative medicine is given by specialists who are fully involved in all aspects of care.

Active treatment to palliative care

Individual can run out of cancer treatment during or after diagnosis. Out of desire to extend their life time, some individuals are interested in taking up aditional clinical trials. Some patients do not show likeliness towards such active treatments when physicians instruct individuals to put an end to active treatment and to follow palliative mode of caring. Resistant to shift may be due to the fact that individual has to undergo multiple number of therapies. Even individuals who are under palliative care would like to shift to some other caring as it is life time care. Bringing hope back to individual is not an easy task. However, it takes prolonged time and is not linear regression. It is a tendency of individual who are at the verge of death prefers painless death generally.

Importance of better communication

Terminal care like palliative care requires open communication among the individuals and physicians. Most of the individuals require psychosocial needs. When their needs are satisfied by palliative care, then individual is subjected to stress. Loss increases when individual’s disease advances. One such obvious loss is physical health. However, health care provider can reduce the dissatisfaction to an extent by avoiding miscommunication. Individuals who suffer from end of life require sensitive physicians in order to satisfy their needs at the earliest. Communication becomes complex when something bad about individual health has to be disseminated to the family members. Effective communication helps the health care providers to achieve their goal of curing and care providing.

Questions:

• What are the roles of palliative care team?
• Describe how communication is importance to prevent death of an individual.
• Write short note on symptom management by palliative care.
• Discuss ethical issues of palliative care.
• How end of life care or terminal care should be administered?
• Give evidence for palliative care aspects.
• How health care providers achieve their goals of curing?