Speaker Biography

Federica Bosso

Rizzoli Orthopedic Institute, Italy

Title: What is Palliative Care?

Federica Bosso
Biography:

Federica Bosso ios currently working as a nurse and representative of the infectious risk at the Rizzoli Orthopedic Institute, Italy

Abstract:

Palliative care is set up as a branch of medicine that deals with providing assistance to people in the advanced phase of illness; we are talking about an untreatable disease, that does not foresee treatments aimed at healing, a disease that Inevitably will continue its course culminating in the death of the assisted person. However, the fact that a disease cannot be healed does not necessarily means that it cannot be cured. In this context it is necessary to make a distinction between healing and cure, healing is a condition that foresees the regression, until the disappearance, of a morbid event, and instead the treatment involves an intervention aimed at the treatment of the symptoms of a certain affection, with the intent of guaranteeing a better quality of life.

All of this does not reduce to a purely practical assistance but to a global, universal assistance that in addition to the physical dimension includes the emotional, psychological, environmental, spiritual, of the patient himself but also of his family, in my personal opinion, also of the operators themselves, because it is a delicate work, in which being continually exposed to suffering and pain, together with the experience of each patient, can have psychological consequences even on operators themselves, so it is important to have a solid and united team of work and the awareness that they can count on the support of their colleagues at any time.

In this area of care many variables are to be taken into account, the pain , the illness, the life’s expectative but in my opinion the most important is communication, aimed at establishing therapeutic compliance with the patient, carefully evaluating When and How to relate to the patient, because it takes a long time to establish a therapeutic relation but a single second or a wrong word could destroy it and, without the patient compliance would be really difficult to carry on an assistance process.