Palliative Care and Prehospital Emergency Medicine

Palliative Care and Prehospital Emergency Medicine

Palliative care, which is intended to keep patients at home as long as possible, is increasingly proposed for patients who live at home, with their family, or in retirement homes. Although their condition is expected to have a lethal evolution, the patients—or more often their families or entourages—are sometimes confronted with sudden situations of respiratory distress, convulsions, hemorrhage...

Prehospital and Emergency Care

Disease or illness can strike at any time. If the condition is acute, or if the injury is life-threatening or limbthreatening, immediate care is needed. These timedependent conditions that affect both adults and children may be due to medical, surgical, or obstetric conditions. They may result from acute injuries or illnesses or from exacerbations of chronic disease. In lowand middle-income cou...

Integration of palliative care into emergency medicine: the Improving Palliative Care in Emergency Medicine (IPAL-EM) collaboration.

BACKGROUND Emergency department (ED) providers commonly care for seriously ill patients who suffer from advanced, chronic, life-limiting illnesses in addition to those that are acutely ill or injured. Both the chronically ill and those who present in extremis may benefit from application of palliative care principles. CASE REPORT We present a case highlighting the opportunities and need for b...

Incorporating prehospital care into emergency medicine residency training.

Practically speaking: emergency medicine and the palliative care movement.

Daily experience in the ED suggests that patients suffering from chronic life-limiting illnesses are all too often caught in a revolving door of emergency care that wastes resources and fails to properly address their stage of disease and goals of care. With regularity, these patients cycle from acute episode to acute episode – from the ED to a hospital bed and home again – without being offere...