Kontakt 2011, 13(4):412-418 | DOI: 10.32725/kont.2011.045

Hospice and palliative care in children with cancer diseaseNursing - Review

Denisa Schwetzová^1,*, Věra Vránová², Šárka Ježorská³

¹ Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, Fakulta zdravotnických věd

² Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, Fakulta zdravotnických věd, Ústav porodní asistence

³ Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, Fakulta zdravotnických věd, Ústav společenských a humanitních věd

Over the last ten years, the consideration of the palliative care as an important theme of public health and health politics has been declared by the World Health Organization and European Council. The palliative care is sometimes being particularly taken into account as certain specific philosophy of taking care applied by extraordinarily motivated individuals in their clinical practice. The motivation and dedication of individual healthcare professionals is of obvious importance. The palliative care should be considered in wider context to provide the availability of quality palliative care for diseased children at the end of life. In the paediatric care, there are biological, psychosocial and spiritual components and plan of taking the care and solution in practice. The communication concerning the disease and particular possibilities is of top importance in this field. In addition to the psychosocial topics, the individual attitude is also of a great importance. The palliative and hospice care is particularly focused on advanced stages of cancer diseases, the problems being different for the child, parents and caregiver. In some cases the treatment of the pain and symptoms, and in other cases for example mental aspects, are of importance. However, there is always necessary to maintain the hopes even in seemingly helpless situations. The target of the palliative care is optimizing the child life quality, providing alleviation, moderating problems and making the family possible to take care of the dying child with providing care for individual members of the family as well as family as whole. Over the last 20 years, in Europe, there is a concept of taking the palliative care of advanced, terminally diseased patients also penetrating into the main stream of medicine. In 2008 the Czech Society of Palliative Medicine at the J. E. Purkyně Czech Medical Society was founded, the purpose of which is to cooperate with other professional societies but also with insurance companies and Czech Ministry of Health in the field of the development and enhancement of the attainability of the general and specialized palliative care. However, the position, level and quality of the palliative care and its actual attainability are very different in different European countries. Malignant tumour diseases in children under 15 years of age belong to rare diseases. In spite of this, they are the second most frequent cause of death in childhood. The target of the contribution presented here is to acquaint the reader with problems of children oncology, and palliative and hospice care for children in the Czech Republic and worldwide. The contribution also indicates the fact that most children with oncological diseases die in hospitals in spite of the fact that most parents would like to make their child possible to spend the last days in home environment. The task of healthcare professionals is to provide the dying children and their parents with the care. In the Czech Republic, there is extensive palliative and hospice care for adult patients, but it has not yet found a wider use in paediatric patients.

Keywords: palliative care; hospice care; cancer diseases in children; Foundation Klíček

Received: February 8, 2011; Accepted: October 5, 2011; Published: December 16, 2011  Show citation