Palliative care; role of family physicians

Palliative care is the holistic approach to provide relief to patients suffering from life threatening diseases and their families throughout the disease. This is mainly through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification, comprehensive assessment and management of physic...

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Main Authors: Ramanayake, R. P. J. C., Dilanka, G. V. A., Premasiri, L. W. S. S.
Format: Online
Language:English
Published: Medknow Publications & Media Pvt Ltd 2016
Online Access:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5084539/
id pubmed-5084539
recordtype oai_dc
spelling pubmed-50845392016-11-14 Palliative care; role of family physicians Ramanayake, R. P. J. C. Dilanka, G. V. A. Premasiri, L. W. S. S. Review Article Palliative care is the holistic approach to provide relief to patients suffering from life threatening diseases and their families throughout the disease. This is mainly through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification, comprehensive assessment and management of physical, psychosocial and spiritual problems. With the rise of elderly population in the world patients needing palliative care will also increase. Family physicians who are closest to the community and easily accessible has a major role to play in providing palliative care. Their broad knowledge, long standing relationship with patients and their families, ability to carry out home visits and communicate and coordinate with other health care resources place them in an ideal position to address complex issues faced by patients. Keeping up to date with knowledge, acquiring counseling skills, non availability of guide lines and medications, lack of support from team and time constraints are the challenges faced by family physicians in providing palliative care. With the aging population, demand on palliative care resources will increase markedly in the next few decades. Developing palliative care models, improving the skills and opportunities for doctors to learn sound palliative care principles have to be initiated without a delay in order to meet the challenges of the future. Medknow Publications & Media Pvt Ltd 2016 /pmc/articles/PMC5084539/ /pubmed/27843819 http://dx.doi.org/10.4103/2249-4863.192356 Text en Copyright: © Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as the author is credited and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.
repository_type Open Access Journal
institution_category Foreign Institution
institution US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building NCBI PubMed
collection Online Access
language English
format Online
author Ramanayake, R. P. J. C.
Dilanka, G. V. A.
Premasiri, L. W. S. S.
spellingShingle Ramanayake, R. P. J. C.
Dilanka, G. V. A.
Premasiri, L. W. S. S.
Palliative care; role of family physicians
author_facet Ramanayake, R. P. J. C.
Dilanka, G. V. A.
Premasiri, L. W. S. S.
author_sort Ramanayake, R. P. J. C.
title Palliative care; role of family physicians
title_short Palliative care; role of family physicians
title_full Palliative care; role of family physicians
title_fullStr Palliative care; role of family physicians
title_full_unstemmed Palliative care; role of family physicians
title_sort palliative care; role of family physicians
description Palliative care is the holistic approach to provide relief to patients suffering from life threatening diseases and their families throughout the disease. This is mainly through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification, comprehensive assessment and management of physical, psychosocial and spiritual problems. With the rise of elderly population in the world patients needing palliative care will also increase. Family physicians who are closest to the community and easily accessible has a major role to play in providing palliative care. Their broad knowledge, long standing relationship with patients and their families, ability to carry out home visits and communicate and coordinate with other health care resources place them in an ideal position to address complex issues faced by patients. Keeping up to date with knowledge, acquiring counseling skills, non availability of guide lines and medications, lack of support from team and time constraints are the challenges faced by family physicians in providing palliative care. With the aging population, demand on palliative care resources will increase markedly in the next few decades. Developing palliative care models, improving the skills and opportunities for doctors to learn sound palliative care principles have to be initiated without a delay in order to meet the challenges of the future.
publisher Medknow Publications & Media Pvt Ltd
publishDate 2016
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5084539/
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