ABSTRACT
According to the World Health Organization, ‘palliative care is an important component of integrated treatment for young and old throughout the life course’ (WHO 2014). The main goal of palliative care is to enable people to live a comfortable and satisfying life despite their illness-related burdens and concerns. At the core of palliative care is patient- and family-centred complex symptom management and care (Carduff et al. 2018; Munday, Johnson & Griffiths 2003; Pask et al. 2018). To relieve the physical, social, psychological, and spiritual sorrows, an interdisciplinary and multi-professional attempt is made to take care of patients in their social context, seeing family and friends as an important part of patients’ support systems. Whether in institutional settings, such as a hospital, hospice, nursing home, or day care centre, or in outpatient care, professional caregivers accessing patients’ bodily, mental, social, and spiritual realms need to have competencies that extend beyond guideline-driven formal assessment and care models.
