The ultimate goal of Palliative Care is to provide wellbeing, comfort and support to patients and their families in the final stages of a terminal illness. We aim to ensure that patients are conscious and free of pain, with the symptoms under control, without subjecting them to tests or aggressive treatments that are useless for the vital prognosis, in order to achieve that the person preserves his dignity during this last phase of the disease.

Palliative Care does not accelerate the process of dying. It does not prolong life, but it does not accelerate death either. It only provides medical expertise and emotional and spiritual support to offer relief to the person when the disease progresses and is irreversible and incurable. A specific training in Palliative Care is vital to be able to face the terminal illness with guarantees for the patient and his family. It is not easy to make decisions about, for example, the Limitation of Therapeutic Effort or the beginning of a Terminal Sedation, as ethical, religious and medical practice principles get mixed.

The Hospice Movement takes place in the Catholic Hospices of Dublin and London in the middle of the last century. One of the pioneering centres was the St. Cristhopher’s Hospice in London, founded by a nurse named Cicely Saunders, and it can be considered the birthplace of the modern Hospice Movement and of Palliative Care. Palliative Care arrived in Spain in the eighties, when some professionals became aware that there was a different way of caring for terminally ill patients. With the merit of the pioneers, they sought training, and got to know closely the reality that was underway. Only a few had the unconditional support of health officials from the beginning.

Today Palliative Medicine is still a young assistencial modality in our country but it has developed in a more than acceptable way. The first Palliative Care Unit in Spain was formed in 1982 and it reached its official recognition in October 1987. It is the Palliative Care Unit of the Hospital Marqués de Valdecilla (Amended text of secpal.com, website of the Spanish Society of Palliative Care).

Nowadays many high complexity hospitals of the public network in our country have Palliative Care Units and many health areas have developed the so-called Palliative Care Support Teams. In our opinion, its development and consolidation is a still pending a challenge in the field of private medicine, where we intend to be pioneers with the support of the group with whom we work, Quirónsalud.