Ten worrying questions in palliative care

Abstract

Since the 1990s in our country, there has been a growing development of care and attention to the patient at the end of his/her life, as a response to a tangible reality: more than half of deaths occur due to a disease in an advanced or terminal state. Palliative care has proved to be the most suitable model for dealing with this situation of the end of life, complementing the task of the normalised network of primary and hospital care. Twenty years after the start of palliative activity in Spain, we ask whether its practice, in the strategies and plans of the different national and regional health systems, corresponds to what is set out on paper, or whether this simply reflects wishful thinking. As the World Health Organisation (WHO) emphasises, palliative care is one of the foundations of care for patients with cancer and other chronic processes in advanced and terminal phases, but it is necessary to review whether the presence, accessibility and quality of this care is what the citizens deserve. In this article we pose a series of worrying questions about palliative care in order to reflect on the possibilities of improvements in this field.