Providing Palliative Care for a Dying Teen at Home: Perspectives and Challenges

Adolescents and young adults with cancer are a heterogeneous group. Management of this special group requires a broad-based interdisciplinary clinical team, which should include palliative care (PC), psychology, social work, oncology, and nursing representatives. The function of PC is to provide impeccable pain and other symptom control and to coordinate care as the disease progresses. The cure rate of cancer in adolescents is high but between 10% and 40% of them will develop incurable disease depending on tumor type and prognostic factors. PC in adolescents should also take care of the specific physical and psychosocial developmental changes in this age group. A 16-year old boy suffered with incurable disease and team has provided the PC at the door step taken as a case study.