Palliativpflege und Medizin

Abstrakt

Palliative oncology: identity, Progress, and the Path ahead

Alexander Bryan

Palliative care is a rapidly increasing specialization of medicine that involves skilled and active assessment, evaluation, and treatment of patients' and families' medical, psychological, social, and spiritual needs. It adds to the patient's usual medical treatment by providing an extra layer of support. Palliative care is becoming more important in the oncology community as disease is discovered earlier and therapies improve. The role of palliative care services for such patients is actively changing as a result of these developments in oncology. We will discuss evolving paradigms in palliative care and try to identify significant education, research, and policy issues for the field of palliative oncology in this paper. Despite the urgent need to improve multi-faceted and multi-specialty symptom treatment as well as patient– physician communication Oncologists have differing viewpoints on the extent of palliative care, and they continue to get contradictory messages. This occurrence highlights a fast changing healthcare landscape, needing ongoing palliative care education and professional self-evaluation in order to give the best possible care to patients with critical diseases