Predicting death in children

Title

Predicting death in children

Creator

Brook L; Hain R

Publisher

Archives Of Disease In Childhood

Date

2008

Subject

Child; Female; Humans; Male; Terminally Ill; Attitude to Death; Preschool; Parents/psychology; Life Expectancy; Palliative Care/methods/standards; Professional-Family Relations/ethics

Description

Rarely do paediatric palliative medicine physicians have to break the news of a diagnosis of a life-limiting condition. It is much commoner for us to be faced with the question: "how long?". This cannot be answered with certainty, and yet a great deal may depend on it. While palliative care should ideally be available from diagnosis, the need for "active" practical palliative care intervention will fluctuate during the course of a child's illness, often over months or years, sometimes decades. Typically, there will be several periods during which death seems likely before the final terminal episode, particularly among children with non-malignant life-limiting condition. Optimal management of all episodes depends on anticipating the child's needs, which in turn depends on recognising that such an episode has begun. Providing adequate palliative care critically depends on making a diagnosis of dying. In this article, we will consider why it is important to make a diagnosis of dying, briefly review some of the helpful tools available, and examine some of the evidence from published literature in children and adults.
2008

Rights

Article information provided for research and reference use only. PedPalASCNET does not hold any rights over the resource listed here. All rights are retained by the journal listed under publisher and/or the creator(s).

Type

Journal Article

Citation List Month

Backlog

Citation

Brook L; Hain R, “Predicting death in children,” Pediatric Palliative Care Library, accessed March 29, 2024, https://pedpalascnetlibrary.omeka.net/items/show/14137.