Abstract
Pediatric palliative care is an interdisciplinary medical specialty addressing the complex needs of children with life-limiting illnesses, and their families. Its core concerns involve the treatment of troublesome symptoms and assisting families in medical decision-making and determining the goals of care. In addition to biomedical issues, pediatric palliative care teams attempt to attend to social, psychological, and spiritual aspects of the patient experience. Research directed at a mechanistic understanding of resilience in pediatric palliative care is burdened by conceptual and definitional difficulties, as well as the limitations in any effort to measure psychosocial outcomes in a population with high morbidity and mortality. Although research on resilience among these patients is limited, addressing suffering, supporting the role of parental goals and preferences and, when possible, supporting the child’s voice through the process of care, has important implications for the child’s resilience. These efforts in themselves may be understood as being motivated by the desire to promote and sustain resilience, as the child’s sense of intactness is supported and protected through “regoaling,” addressing suffering, and promoting meaningful, identity-enrich responses to the challenges of serious illness.
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Goldstein, R.D. (2016). Resilience in the Care of Children with Palliative Care Needs. In: DeMichelis, C., Ferrari, M. (eds) Child and Adolescent Resilience Within Medical Contexts. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32223-0_7
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