Repercussions for the family accompanying a patient in palliative care

Abstract

Palliative care emerges as a paradigm change in the treatment of patients that are out of therapeutic possibilities in order to relieve pain and suffering. This article is based on documents and publications from Brazil regarding the subject above and it aims to understand the main impacts that affect patients’s families facing therapeutic impossibility, also highlighting feelings, emotions and experiences. This study is a systematic review based on existing articles in of the Virtual Health Library - Scielo, Lilacs and Pepsic database. This case study considers articles from 2012 to 2016 and addresses the descriptors: medical and family care. 15 existing publications were analyzed. It was possible to identify the following categories: home and hospital care singularities, experienced feelings by the caregiver, inherent difficulties in caring, and sources of carer support. Such categories allowed to understand that when family members are facing a disease that is out of therapeutic possibilities, it becomes necessary a system rearrangement. In most of the cases, when facing patient’s terminality, a caregiver often becomes responsible for the patient, suffering the inherent impacts it might cause, contributing for debates about palliative care and provided support to the families, that in this particularly case assumes caregiver role.