What is Palliative Care ?
The preamble of the French Society for Accompanying Support and Palliative Care gives a complete definition (www.sfap.org):
"Palliative Care are the active, holistic care of patients with advanced progressive illness.
The goal of palliative care is the achievement of the best quality of live for patients and their families, through the management of pain and other symptoms, and providing psychological, social and spiritual support.
Supportive and palliative care are multidisciplinary. It takes into account the patient as a person, within his family, in his home or in hospital. Providing information, education and support for caregivers and volunteers are part of this process.
Palliative care affirms life and regards dying as a natural process, it refuses unnecessary investigations and treatments, and is opposed to assisted dying. Palliative care strives to help patients live as well as possible with the effects of illness until death, and offers support to help the family during the illness and in their bereavement.
Through their clinical practice, teaching and research, palliative care providers aim to promote these principles."
In order to adapt to the world of maternity and neonatology, the palliative care approach must be modified since the person going to die is a baby who has not been born and the closest people to him or her are the parents, especially the mother who carries the baby.
The approach to accompany the end of life in maternity presents the particularity of being lived in two stages:
- the period of accompanying the mother during her pregnancy,
- the period of accompanying the child from birth to natural death.
It can be carried out in many maternities and paediatric services and requires above all an informed medical team ready to listen to the parents.
