Deaths from COVID-19 are approaching 3 million world-wide. Much of the discussion about ethical issues has centered around the availability of ventilators, but little has been said about the need and the responsibility to provide palliative care, ways to integrate a palliative approach for those who are seriously ill, and how to best support those who may or many not get (or want) a ventilator.
In Ontario palliative care specialists helped and provided care in the long term care facilities hardest hit by COVID. But specialist cannot do this in isolation.
In the Journal American Medical Association, article titled, “Integration of Palliative Care into All Serious Illness Care as a Human Right” Rosa, Ferrell and Mason wrote:
“COVID-19 has highlighted that every clinician needs knowledge and skills in the fundamentals of palliative care.“
Palliative care is not dependent on life-saving interventions. It may very well include a ventilator, but it is ultimately structured around the individualized wants and needs of the patient. It includes alleviating suffering and managing complex communications, psychosocial dynamics, fluctuating symptom management needs, and spiritual care throughout the dying process.
Every patient treated with a ventilator also needs palliative care. It is not an either-or clinical proposition, but rather a both-and moral imperative.
COVID-19 has accentuated the need for clinicians to have frequent conversations with patients and families about dying. The pandemic has forced many healthy people to confront rapid-onset, life-threatening trajectories of acute illness. Patients are dying without their loved ones, and families are grieving alone. For every person who dies, an average of 9 others are profoundly affected and grieve.2 COVID-19 has interrupted the cultural and community practices for coping with death, raising concerns about the pervasiveness of grief and loss associated with the pandemic….
Access to palliative care is a human right. Our inability to deliver it in the setting of COVID-19 and other serious illnesses is a human rights violation. Education… is needed now.
Personal Support Workers and nurses (both in field and in training), like all health care providers, need the tools and foundation to know how to support individuals living and dying with COVID-19 or living and dying with any life-limiting illness. Now.
