History And Principles of Palliative Care

Palliative Care
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Introduction
Palliative care has been defined as the care which is being provided by the medical
professionals to the patients to give them relief from pain, stress, and symptoms of the
chronic disease regardless of diagnosis (UK health care, 2022). In this paper, history of the
palliative care, principles related to palliative care as well as palliative care delivery practice
will be discussed.
History of palliative care
Many studies have been conducted regarding the life endings in 1950s. Palliative care
focussed on the care provided to the people dying. Careful observation of people who were
dying was done by Dr. Cicely Saunders in the late 1950s and spread the vision of modern
hospice care. After observation, Dr. Saunders specified that an interdisciplinary team can be
helpful in relieving the full pain of any dying individual which is the main aspect of palliative
care till now (Pistone, 2018). In the 1960s it was Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist who
opposed the cruel treatment that dying people observe during their last stage of life and stated
that those people must be treated with esteem, honesty, and free-spoken communication in
her book On Death and Dying. This has helped in revolutionizing and humanizing the care
for the patients who were dying (Guseva, 2019). In 1974 another person who was the
Oncologist in a University in Canada, Dr. Balfour Mount introduced the term palliative care
in the French culture in order to positively connote the word hospice and presented the
innovations done by Dr. Saunders in academic teaching hospitals. The first step was to make
people understand the holistic care that people suffering from chronic disease and their
families need who were undergoing physical, psychological, social, and spiritual ache.
Additionally, major changes and efforts were made to involve palliative care in mainstream
medicine and nursing in the US after the report named as Approaching Death: improving care