Description
Paediatric Palliative Care Guidelines
These guidelines have been written to help doctors and nurses looking after children with life-limiting and life-threatening illnesses and their families
Paediatric palliative care involves helping and supporting children and families coping with a wide spectrum of conditions. Some children will have illnesses from which they will die in days, weeks or months and others may have a prognosis of many years. Thus formulaic responses to any symptom is inappropriate. All management needs to be put in the context of the individual child and where they are in relation to their life journey. For those practitioners who are seldom involved in caring for children with either life-limiting or life-threatening illness their management can. be daunting. Close liaison with the specialist services is strongly recommended. This guidance cannot replace a phone call to your local paediatric palliative care team or children's hospice, but they can be a helpful backup to such support.
Palliative Adult Network Guidelines
These Guidelines represent a general reflection of current local practice in palliative care to be used in conjunction with the British National Formulary, the Palliative Care Formulary. The Oxford Textbook of Palliative Medicine. The Oxford Handbook of Palliative Care and other comprehensive texts. Although aimed at non-specialist doctors and nurses some of the material is more suitable for those with a specialist interest. The drugs mentioned in this text are listed alphabetically in the formulary section. Many of these drugs are used outside their current product licenses.
Where possible we have based the Guidance on Grade I evidence; but where such evidence as yet does not exist we try to base our recommendations on as robust evidence as is currently available.
