Clinical Manual of Palliative Care for Any Setting: Toward Universal Contextually-Adapted Access

Palliative care is a medically and morally imperative response to any suffering - physical, psychological, social or spiritual, chronic or acute - that is associated with serious illness, serious injury, or severe emotional trauma, and that is not promptly relieved by treatment of underlying conditions.

Clinical Manual of Palliative Care for Any Setting provides an easy-to-use manual and clinical guide aimed at helping medical doctors, clinical officers, nurse practitioners, and other healthcare professionals to provide high-quality and contextually-adapted palliative care in any setting. This is particularly important for contexts where healthcare resources are limited.

The manual is designed to enable practicing clinicians at all levels of health care systems to integrate basic palliative care with illness treatment and to integrate state-of-the-art symptom relief and psycho-social support with local cultural values. To maximize its usefulness in resource-limited settings, where palliative care is least accessible and suffering most pervasive, its guidance includes only medicines, equipment, and resources that are safe, effective, inexpensive, and widely available in most low- and middle-income countries. It also guides integration of palliative care into health care systems. The manual is a product of the Program in Global Palliative Care at Harvard Medical School and its network of dedicated partners working in low- and middle-income settings toward universal access to palliative care.

Eric L. Krakauer, MD, PhD, is Director of the Program in Global Palliative Care and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. He is also an Attending Physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Honorary Chair, Department of Palliative Medicine, at the University of Medicine & Pharmacy, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.