Abstract
Pediatric palliative care is a growing field in which the currently available resources are still insufficient to meet the palliative care needs of children worldwide. Specifically, in Latin America, pediatric palliative care services have emerged unevenly and are still considered underdeveloped when compared to other regions of the world. A crucial step in developing pediatric palliative care (PPC) programs is delineating quality indicators; however, no consensus has been reached on the outcomes or how to measure the impact of PPC. Additionally, Latin America has unique sociocultural characteristics that impact the perception, acceptance, enrollment and implementation of palliative care services. To date, no defined set of quality indicators has been proposed for the region. This article explores the limitations of current available quality indicators and describes the Latin American context and how it affects PPC development. This information can help guide the creation of standards of care and quality indicators that meet local PPC needs while considering the sociocultural landscape of Latin America and its population.
Highlights
Pediatric palliative care (PPC) is an interdisciplinary approach to care that focuses on maximizing quality of life (QoL) for children and their families who face a life-limiting or life-threatening illness
In light of the immature stage of development of PPC in LA, the lack of consensus in PPC quality indicators and considering the impact that local culture has on the provision of palliative care, the objective of this paper is to review and describe specific characteristics of the LA context that uniquely influence PPC development
We summarized and categorized available PPC standards of care and quality indicators to match the level of development needed to achieve them [11,12,14,15,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48]
Summary
Pediatric palliative care (PPC) is an interdisciplinary approach to care that focuses on maximizing quality of life (QoL) for children and their families who face a life-limiting or life-threatening illness. It starts at diagnosis and continues throughout the child’s life, during death and into bereavement. Since palliative care focuses on relieving SHS associated with serious health problems or the end of life, SHS can be used as a proxy for palliative care need [2,4] This need has yet to be met, as accessibility to PPC continues to be disparate across the world, and PPC services are considered underdeveloped across Asia, Africa and Latin.
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