Palliative Care: Barriers To Palliative Care

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“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” (WHO, 2016).
Older adults may have chronic problems that leads to illnesses that are life threatening. These critically ill patients and their family should be offered the opportunity to receive palliative care consultations during admission. Palliative care offer critically ill patients better quality and cost the health care system less. However, there are an increased number of patients that die each …show more content…
These barriers include the misconception among health care providers (HCP) and the patient’s family members that this care is for patients near death. Some HCP thinks that it undermines the focus of saving the patients’ life and lack knowledge about the extent and variety of palliative care services that are available at their institution. Introducing the idea of palliative care can also cause moderate anxiety which causes the discussion to be quick, inadequate and ineffective. In addition, the culture of the patients, their family and the unit can contribute to lack of discussion. The nurse can help overcome these barriers by ensuring the HCP, patients and families understands the service and the benefit it offers, work with HCP to develop unit specific criteria for patients referrals and ensuring the appropriate patients receive the referral (Perrin & Kazanowski, …show more content…
Lack of knowledge about the benefits of palliative care services and when it is most beneficial during the disease process to refer these patient is the most common reason physicians fail to make a timely referral. Fear of losing control or being a failure to the patient if no further life sustaining treatments were available in addition to negative impact of late referral or non-referral on the patient and their family all form part of the barrier to patient receiving palliative care. To overcome these barriers, it is important to integrate palliative care in nursing and medical school education, advanced education of general practitioners in palliative care, and education of the public about palliative care and its benefits (Melvin & Oldham,
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