Palliative Care Research and Ethical Challenges

Introduction In late 1960s, Palliative Care was started as a multidisciplinary approach for delivering quality care to terminally ill people, to help them ‘live until they died’.[1] [2] There is a significant need for research in palliative care to assess the needs of the carers and care-recipients as well as the services utilised by them because of the increasing care-recipient population and burden on caregivers.[3]The word ‘research’ can be defined as ‘an investigation to gain knowledge and understanding [and insight of the issue under study] or to train researcher’.[4] However, after decades of research in the field of palliative care still there is lack of practically generalizable evidence base and a need for further research.[5] This is credited to the ethical constraints and challenges faced during palliative care research by the researcher because of the overprotective institutional ethics committee.[1] Thus, instead of a paternalistic attitude a democratic approach should be sought to mend the gaps in the evidence base of palliative care research, keeping autonomy, beneficence, justice and non-maleficence under consideration.