Palliative Health Care

Dame Cicely Saunders, physician started her work with the fatally ill during 1948 and ultimately went on to build the first contemporary rest home—St. Christopher’s Hospice— positioned in a suburban area in London.

Saunders initiated the thought of expert care for the terminally to the United States in 1963 during a visit at Yale University.  She gave a lecture to medical learners, nurses, community workers, and chaplains regarding the concept of hospice care, which included snapshots of cancer terminally ill patients and their relatives, showing the spectacular differences prior to and subsequent to the symptom care.  This lecture resulted into efforts that developed hospice care in the US. In 1974, Florence Wald, together with two pediatricians along with a chaplain, established the Branford Connecticut Hospice. In the same year, the initial hospice legislation was initiated through Senators Frank Church along with Frank Moss to offer federal finances for hospice programs. The Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) started a demonstration program at 26 hospices throughout the country to evaluate their cost effectiveness in 1979. Fifty years following the establishment of Connecticut Hospice, there are numerous hospice cares in the US (NHPO, 2014).

Principles of palliative care (Dyingwell, 2014)

• The center of palliative care is the individual who is dying in addition to their family.

An essential cohesion in the human being encounter with demise is that family’s lives remain interrelated both emotionally and physically during the last part of life and towards grief

·         Symptom Management; devoid of effective management of severe pain along with other sources of bodily distress, the value of existence for the fading person unavoidably will be unacceptable.

• existence; the mainly basic facet of palliative care is the acknowledgement of dying as a component of life. Dying is typically difficult, unwanted and habitually tragic. Nonetheless, dying is an innate and regular human experience.

References

Dyingwell. (2014). Palliative Care and Hospice – Ira Byock. Retrieved August 4, 2014, from http://www.dyingwell.org/springer.htm

NHPO. (2014). History of Hospice Care. Retrieved August 4, 2014, from http://www.nhpco.org/history-hospice-care