Perspectives in palliative care?

Palliative care is an important issue to both patients and their families. It is a major contributor to the improvement of the quality of life of patients suffering from chronic diseases as well as terminally ill patients. Its importance increases with the aging of our population. Palliative care has met an enormous success in Western countries and particularly in the U.S.A. over the past two decades. In Lebanon we are far behind the international health community in this field. The educational efforts initiated by medical schools are to be applauded but unfortunately very few institutions offer palliative care to their patients in our country. This is mainly due to the lack of support for such an activity from official health organizations and the lack of information among the public concerning the advantages of palliative care. The efforts of medical schools to incorporate palliative care in their teaching programs will be useless if they are not conjugated with an integration of palliative care in every day's clinical practice.