title: A timely referral to palliative care team improves quality of life.
abstract: In the trajectory of disease progress and treatment plan, patients and the family members are confronted with challenging situations like unsurmountable physical distress, inadequate coping patterns, unanswered spiritual issues in the background of serious threat to very existence of life leads to a debilitating Quality of life.The Palliative Care team approach addresses all the issues and also sees the patient to go through the protocols of Palliative care management as well as Oncological treatment plan. Further, this fecilitates a smooth transition from the hospital to home and hospice care. Various studies conducted globally revealed that patients received palliative care intervention along with oncological treatments had higher scores of Quality of life compared to patients received onlyoncology care alone.This article discusses the various factors contributing to late referrals to palliative care team and also care giver's views pertaining to need for early referral. Timely referral to palliative care minimises the patient's and care giver's distress, ensures modest Quality of life and appropriate measures at the end of life care.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anaesthesiology and Pain Relief, Kidwai Memorial Institute of Oncology, Bangalore, India.
authors.forename: P Saraswathi
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: Devi