The promotion of palliative care has met opposition from doctors who say it contravenes their duty to save lives, a physician from Taipei City Hospital said.
Many doctors found it difficult to let go of patients when the hospital first began promoting palliative care, despite the doctors being fully trained for the procedure, Taipei City Hospital director Huang Sheng-chien (黃勝堅) said.
“There might have been 100 patients we could have put in palliative care wards, but only 15 were placed in such wards,” Huang said.
This was caused by doctors lacking the training to accurately judge whether a patient had a terminal illness, Huang added.
There were incidents in which doctors considered the patient to be in moderately good health and the patient would pass away within a few months, Huang said.
“For many patients, it was too late to be moved to palliative care,” Huang said, adding that this was due to the reluctance of family members to accept that their loved ones were reaching the end of their life.
Medical teams must improve their ability to judge when a patient is beyond medical help, despite the patient’s death being difficult to accept for their relatives, Huang said.
Since the hospital began promoting palliative care two years ago, 50 percent of those who accepted such care were cancer patients, while patients with other illnesses comprised a small number of palliative care patients, Huang said.
Huang encouraged doctors, patients and their relatives to work toward providing comfort and dignity to patients in a time when society is aging, with dementia and disabilities caused by advanced age becoming more commonplace.
Hospital staff are adapting to the policy and accepting the concept of palliative care, Huang said, adding that the cases in which patients want to die while doctors try to make them live are “a futile effort that goes against the natural order.”
Sometimes, “letting go” might achieve what medicine cannot do and prolong one’s life, Huang said.
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