Providing palliative care to adults is seen as an important component of general practitioners’ (GP’s) practice as, although palliative medicine is recognized as an established specialty, it is unlikely that all patients requiring palliative care will be managed by a specialist. “Palliative care” is used here to describe the holistic multi-professional care given to children and their families, and “palliative medicine” the medical specialty of doctors working solely with patients with life-limiting conditions. Pediatric palliative medicine (PPM) is less well established than adult palliative medicine (only being recognized as a subspecialty for doctors in 2009 and providing palliative care to children often poses challenges to GPs. The challenges can be attributed in part to the infrequency of child deaths in the community but may also be influenced by the lack of pediatric training UK GPs undertake (only 40-50% of GPs complete a pediatric placement during training.

Pediatric Oncology Palliative Care: Experiences of General Practitioners and Bereaved Parents

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