ARCHIVES OF MEDICAL SCIENCE, 2016; 12(2): 457-468. The main task of palliative care (PC) units is to provide a dignified life for people with advanced progressive chronic disease through appropriate symptom management, communication between medical specialists and the patient and his family, as well as the coordination of care. Many PC units struggle with low incomes from the National Health Fund (NHF), which causes serious economic problems. The study showed a significant difference between the actual cost of PC units and the level of refund from the NHF. Based on the analysis of costs, the application has been submitted to the NHF to change the reimbursement amount of PC services.
BANGLADESH JOURNAL OF MEDICAL SCIENCE, 2016; 15 (1): 51-56. The authors describe a novel approach where an individual doctor ensured his own training, obtained a substantial grant from a national university that had a campus in the region, and worked closely together with an established foundation for people with disabilities to establish a palliative care service for children. This care is among the first one in Malaysia with its own unique model of integration at different levels of care.
BMC PALLIATIVE CARE | Online – 9 April 2016 – Looking after a very sick child at home is enormously difficult for families, especially if they have limited infrastructure, little access to services and very few resources. Although there may be community workers who could help, few of them are equipped or trained to give advice regarding palliation. This home-based paediatric palliative care (PC) training and support package is designed to help home- and community-based care (HCBC) workers who are in a position to support families in provision of quality PC. The comprehensive training and support package is presented within an adult-friendly learning framework that is accessible to a range of literacy levels. The underlying principle is to facilitate learning through practice in the home environment and to build partnerships between professional health care workers, HCBC workers, families, sick children and caregivers. The training guide contains practical guidance, techniques and tips. One of the main strengths of the package is it can be used in its entirety or the individual components can be used separately as resources and need dictate.
BMC PALLIATIVE CARE | Online – 9 April 2016 – The link-nurse programme has been successful in meeting its aims of equipping nurses from different wards with knowledge and skills enabling them to provide generalist palliative care (PC) alongside their clinical team and improving links between the wards and the Makerere/Mulago Palliative Care Unit. It has radically improved PC within Mulago Hospital, Uganda Heart Institute and Uganda Cancer Institute both in reaching more people, but also in providing care according to extent of needs, enabling specialist PC practitioners to concentrate more on those with complex needs, as well as offering training and mentor-ship. PC need in hospitals such as Mulago Hospital are great, and integrated models of care that strengthen health systems need to be developed in order to meet that need and to ensure that all patients in the hospitals who need it have access to PC services, through both generalist and specialist provision. Further work is needed to test this model in smaller hospitals, and to develop a model for integrated care in health centres and dispensaries, and linking these settings together in a whole systems approach to ensure universal coverage of PC provision.
BMC PALLIATIVE CARE | Online – 24 March 2016 – The proposal of four major priority areas and a range of minor themes for future research in intellectual disability, death, dying and palliative care will help researchers to focus limited resources and research expertise on areas where it is most needed and support the building of collaborations. The next steps are to cross-validate these research priorities with people with intellectual disabilities, carers, clinicians, researchers and other stakeholders across Europe; to validate them with local and national policy makers to determine how they could best be incorporated in policy and programmes; and, to translate them into actual research studies by setting up European collaborations for specific studies that require such collaboration, develop research proposals and attract research funding.
CUADERNOS DE DERECHO TRANSNACIONAL, 2016; 8 (1): 5-16. Little attention has been paid so far to the right to palliative care (PC) from an international legal viewpoint. This is despite the fact that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) have been confronted with issues related to PC on some occasions. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap and to assess and subsequently compare and contrast the respective approaches of the ECtHR and of the IACtHR to PC. The paper will address, through some relevant examples, the enduring resistance by these two human rights courts to the affirmation of a human right to PC. It also formulates some proposals for overcoming these difficulties, including among others: 1) An interpretation of the right to life under Article 2 of the ECHR aimed at distinguishing euthanasia from PC; 2) a care-oriented interpretation of the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatments under Article 3 ECHR by the ECtHR; 3) a constant use of the notion of the “vida digna” [“dignified life”] under Article 4 of the ACHR in the medical jurisprudence of the IACtHR; 4) a use of the Inter-American Convention on the Rights of Older Persons of 2014 that explicitly recognizes a right to PC in the ACtHR 's case-law; and, 5) a use of the WHO recommendations related to PC in the medical case-law of the ECtHR and the ACtHR.
REVISTA GAÚCHA DE ENFERMAGEM, 2016; 37(1): e55080. This study shows that being a family member and a health professional at the same time demands greater involvement in care and decision-making regarding treatment since these workers have the scientific and technical knowledge that the other family members do not have. The participants of this study claimed that witnessing a family member suffering from a disease and the final stage of their lives caused distress, whereas their professional knowledge helped them make decision through this process.
N.B. Full text in either Portuguese or English.
Media Watch is intended as an advocacy, education and research tool. The weekly report, published by Barry R. Ashpole, a Canadian communications consultant and educator, monitors the literature and the lay press on issues specific to the quality of end-of-life care. It is international in scope and distribution. Each month, this section of the IAHPC Newsletter will publish an abstract or summary of an article or report of special interest noted in recent issues of Media Watch (see below).
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