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Abstract

Palliative care focuses on optimizing the quality of life of patients with life-threatening illnesses by helping alleviate pain, treating the symptoms of patients with chronic illnesses, and by providing psychosocial and spiritual support (Anderson & Puntillo, 2017). Palliative care can be initiated at any stage of a serious illness while continuing the treatment; it is a comprehensive patient-centered approach that can help patients and families in multiple ways. Palliative care includes an open discussion about coordination of care and support for the family. While the primary purpose of palliative care is to address the distressing symptoms that a patient may be experiencing, one of the main and most important goals of palliative care is to help alleviate the legal and financial burdens of a life-threatening illness by providing counselling on advanced care planning, which will be the main focus of this integrative review of literature. Many factors have been identified as barriers to initiating palliative care discussions, which includes the clinician鈥檚 confidence in their own ability to provide palliative care due to lack of education or access to training sessions, the patient鈥檚 lack of knowledge about palliative care, the availability and accessibility of palliative care facilities, and misunderstanding that palliative care is a terminal care (Zheng et al., 2016).

Biography

E-mail: rmaha1@stu.mcphs.edu