Palliativpflege und Medizin

Abstrakt

Ethical Decisions in Palliative Care: How well are Palliative Care Teams prepared to make Them?

Sandra Martins Pereira

Making decisions related to health care issues is a demanding task. These decisions are influenced by many combined factors related to the patient, their relatives, and the professional as an individual and as a team member, beyond other factors considering the team as a whole. When these decisions are concerned to palliative and end-of-life care, ethical dilemmas or problems may occur (e.g: decisions related to place of care and death, decisions regarding therapeutic interventions for symptom control, decisions about withholding and/or withdrawing treatments, decisions considering truth disclosure and communication, decisions considering patients’ autonomy and self-determination, decisions related to the justice and resource distribution). Beside these problems, even though palliative care principles reject any interventions in order to postpone or hasten death, issues such as medical futility, euthanasia and physician assisted suicide need to be reflected and discussed.