Integrate palliative care with cancer treatment

CHENNAI: A number of events organised across the city on Saturday to mark the World Palliative Care Day stressed on the need for integrating palliative care with cancer treatment so that the patients could be saved from both the physical and mental trauma caused by pain which accompanies the disease.Experts who spoke to ENS said that while awareness of palliative care has improved among medical practitioners in the city, the perception that one should go for such help only when they were terminally ill continued to be dominant among patients.Dr Mallika Tiruvadanan, founder of Lakshmi Pain and Palliative Care Clinic, which held an oath taking event at the Government General Hospital here, said palliative care begins right from the diagnosis of the disease and continued even after the death of the patients when, sometimes, the relatives of such persons were counseled to help them come out of the grief of losing their loved ones. She said that sometimes, patients go to the extent of discontinuing cancer treatment owing to the pain that accompanied it.“The question is that if you have a system that could relive their pain and help them stand up to their ailments, why not utilise it?” she said.Deepa Muthaiya, Chairman of the Dean Foundation, which organised an awareness camp at the Elliots beach and at the Ampa Skywalk mall, said that while referrals to palliative care centres from hospitals were increasing, many people still do not know where to approach for such assistance.“We run a state-of-the-art palliative care centre at the government paediatric hospital. However, facilities such as these are not very well known,” she said, adding that such care has to begin much earlier once the diagnosis is done and not just in the advanced stage.Officials on the other hand said that while the need for palliative care has been well recognised, scarcity of trained personnel was still a huge problem in running full-fledged palliative wards in hospitals.