Palliative health care (end of life care) is any type of health treatment or care which focuses on subduing the severity of disease symptoms, instead of endeavouring to cure the person completely. The goal is to stop and alleviate suffering while boosting the actual day-to-day life for patients facing chronic, complex illness.

Even so, not all palliative care centres are identical in the quality they provide, and there has been a lot of allegations – and proven cases – of negligence (and even abuse) taking place in hospitals that lead to people enduring extreme pain and discomfort over drawn-out periods of time. For example an accusation is made against Sheffield Teaching Hospitals who are charged with negligence with a particular individual they were caring for, with inside information of communications between the sufferer’s close relative and the NHS.

So we must not take such care for granted – friends and family of a patient should be watchful and make sure their family member or friend has proper attention.

If your friend or family member is receiving health care via the National Health Service, there’s an NHS complaints procedure you can observe if you want to make a criticism.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 5:37 am and is filed under Health Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.