Palliative care

Palliative care is an integrated approach that focuses on quality of life of ‘patients and their families facing the problems associated with life threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and treatment of other problems, physical, psychosocial, and spiritual’. This embraces the concept that quality care is embedded not only in individual health, but also the environment and setting of care and touches the domains included in the previous World Health Organization (WHO) definition. Palliative care focuses caregivers on the important goals of medicine—alleviating pain and suffering (at all levels), improving the experience of daily living, supporting psychological transitions with changing physical abilities, and advancing the patient’s and family’s understanding of the nature of the disease facing an individual and the outcomes. With that in mind, it represents a basic tenet of care for all patients, particularly those with diseases that lead to significant loss of quality of life and function. While this chapter focuses more on oncological palliative care, the tenets of palliative care and the research about symptom management can extend to the care of women with chronic conditions such as chronic pelvic pain, severe endometriosis, interstitial cystitis, untreatable pelvic prolapse, and other conditions. Palliative care, then, can be a focus for fatal and non-fatal diseases, and can and should be provided to address diminished quality-of-life issues as a part of ongoing treatment of a disease process, not just at the end of life.