When emergency medicine embraces palliative care

Abstract

In Italy Emergency Medicine (EM) and Palliative Care (PC) are still considered two opposite disciplines with two opposite endpoints: saving lives for EM clinicians, and taking care of end-stage patients for palliative care physicians. According to the WHO, PC is “an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychological and spiritual. [...]

Keywords

• emergency medicine
• palliative care
• end of life