Journal of Perioperative & Critical Intensive Care Nursing
Open Access

Supportive And Palliative Care

Palliative care (derived from the Latin root palliate, or "to cloak") is an interdisciplinary medical caregiving approach aimed at optimizing the quality of life and mitigating suffering among people with serious, complex illness.[1] Within the published literature, many definitions of palliative care exist; most notably, the World Health Organization describes palliative care as "an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problems associated with a 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. In the past, palliative care was a disease-specific approach, but today the World Health Organization takes a more broad approach, that the principles of palliative care should be applied as early as possible to any chronic and ultimately fatal illness