What is Palliative Care?

Palliative care is a specialty in medicine that cares for people with advanced diseases such as advanced cancer and end-stage chronic illnesses such as heart failure and kidney failure. It basically deals with life-threatening illnesses which have gone beyond cure.

The World Health Organisation defines Palliative Care as follows:

Palliative care is an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual.

In other words, Palliative Care:

• provides relief from pain and other distressing symptoms;
• affirms life and regards dying as a normal process;
• intends neither to hasten or postpone death;
• integrates the psychological and spiritual aspects of patient care;
• offers a support system to help patients live as actively as possible until death;
• offers a support system to help the family cope during the patients illness and in their own bereavement;
• uses a team approach to address the needs of patients and their families, including bereavement counselling, if indicated;
• will enhance quality of life, and may also positively influence the course of illness;
• is applicable early in the course of illness, in conjunction 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.

Palliative care seeks to provide humane and compassionate care to patients and their families who are going through a difficult period in this journey of life. To give you a deeper appreciation of what palliative is all about, here are some profound verses which speak a thousand words:

“You matter because you are you, and you matter until the last moment of your life. We will do all we can, not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die.” Dame Cicely Saunders

"Which rational being could be at ease, or still less laugh, when he knows of old age, disease and death? Which sentient being could remain unmoved on seeing an aged, ill or dead person? This is perhaps like a tree which remains unaffected even as its neighbor falls bereft of flowers and fruit or is cut down mercilessly." Buddhacharita 4.59-61

"Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that go beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body”

“ Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star, one of the millions of light in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever”


"Slowly I learn about the importance of powerlessness. The secret is not to be afraid of it- not to run away. The dying know that we are not God. All they ask is we do not abandon them."

The founder of the Hospice movement was Dame Cicely Saunders whose life history is nicely summarised here: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/331/7509/DC1

This is what a hospice volunteer had to say about spending time with the dying: http://www.healthandage.com/html/min/gentle_endings/web/volunteer.htm