Summary
The importance of palliative care as a comprehensive approach, with the potential to complete and improve existing care programmes, is now recognised in many of the Council of Europe' member states. Palliative care is a substantial and socially innovative addition to curative, highly scientific medicine, where subjective wellbeing of the patient comes after the goal of curing an illness and which involves therapy-related restrictions and sometimes massive side-effects.
The report endeavours to highlight the central problem of the highly sophisticated and costly healthcare provided particularly in Western Europe, which, at ever shorter intervals, produces new medical techniques and medicines, raising high public expectations of curative success. At the same time, however, this type of healthcare is increasingly - and obviously - failing to meet the basic needs of people suffering from chronic or rare diseases.
The rapporteur considers palliative care as a model for innovative health and social policies. Palliative care does not simply meet a cultural and humanitarian need of the most pThe whole text you can find on following link.ressing kind. It also provides an innovative structure which, if intelligently developed, will not only produce sustainable change in the health sector, but may also serve as a recipe for success in other policy areas with serious, systemic and recurrent problems (eg drug prevention).
The rapporteur therefore regards palliative care as an essential component of appropriate health care based on a humane concept of human dignity, autonomy, human rights, patient rights and a generally acknowledged perception of solidarity and social cohesion.
The report advocates a wide-ranging discussion in society on the priorities of health care based on sensible health objectives and on the fundamental rights of the patients. These objectives must not be left to competition between lobby groups, as the protection of fundamental rights is a government task and not a matter for pressure group politics.