PRESIDENTIAL SYMPOSIUM: DEVELOPING PALLIATIVE CARE SERVICES FOR PEOPLE WITH CHRONIC-PROGRESSIVE DISEASES AT THE END OF LIFE

摘要

Increasingly, it is being recognized that people with chronic-progressive diseases including dementia may benefit from palliative care. However, the palliative phase and what palliative care entails exactly, is less well defined for these people compared with for people with cancer. Further, needs may vary greatly across the long and ill-predicted disease trajectories. This may hinder the implementation and integration of palliative care in clinical practice. Special palliative care services should overcome these challenges and also fit with health care systems and with long-term care services that may be disease oriented or focused on the living situation only.This symposium will present the development and evaluation of palliative care services for people with chronic-progressive disease living in nursing homes and in the community. We report on new initiatives in four countries, the UK, Netherlands, Norway and Israel, for people to die “as homely” and comfortable as possible and to bring palliative care to where people are. We will discuss the new initiatives against a background of literature on how palliative care developed in these countries, in comparison to the US.