Palliative Care for Advanced Practice Nurses

摘要

Palliative care is both a philosophy of care and an organized, highly structured system for delivering care. Palliative care is defined in the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report Dying in America as care that provides relief from pain and other symptoms, supports quality of life, and is focused on patients with serious advanced illness and their families. Palliative care is part of the continuum of care from the time of diagnosis of a serious illness to care that extends to hospice and end-of-life care. Patients may enter intensive care as a result of an acute illness or injury or as a result of an exacerbation of a chronic illness. Increasingly, technology is used to extend life and delay death. Despite the advances in health care and technology, each of us will die, and although 1 in 4 patients dies in a hospital, most people want to die at home.