Palliative Care: Essential Concepts in the Education of Health Professionals
The successful integration of palliative care with the health care system may require a concentrated effort on the part of the professional community to clearly identify those concepts that form the basis for the model. The lack of a clear identification both of those concepts viewed by the various disciplines as forming the model, or basis of palliative care, and of the areas of conflict within the model, can lead to a variety of problems. Specific problems that can occur, as both formal and informal attempts are made to convey information about palliative care, include a) emphasizing one part of the model without providing an overview, b) presenting a portion of a given concept, and c) presenting one side of a conflict around a basic concept. The lack of a clearly delineated model of palliative care may be the result of the multidisciplinary nature of this particular approach to patient care. Each discipline has tended to emphasize those ideas that best represent that particular profession. This paper attempts to extract and describe from the literature those concepts that are emphasized, across disciplines, as essential to the provision of palliative care. Conflicts related to the essential concepts are also described.