Justification
Pediatric Palliative Cares Hospice and Diurnal Center
In Costa Rica, the health attendance system is apart of the social security and its approach is oriented towards the prevention and treatment of pathologies. But there is a population group that suffers of diseases without healing treatment possibility that inevitably are going to die. This population group, specially the pediatric attention one, besides of being highly vulnerable because of the suffered diseases, have a lack of attendance at those last and dramatic moments.
This responds to the fact that being Costa Rica a developing country, the government prioritizes the areas of intervention in health, and Palliative Cares are not a priority within their social security system.
In our country there is no data on the necessities of assistance for this type of patients, but based on the 2000census, the population of Costa Rica was of 3. 824. 600 people, of whom 43, 81% (1, 675, 553), correspond to individuals from 0 to 19years old.
In agreement with other countries index, like England, that have standardized the demand for this type of services based in their mortality profile, it has been considered that 0, 1% of the people under 19 years old, need pediatric palliative cares assistance. If we extrapolate this facts to Costa Rica, with the limitations that this entails by the existing differences between both countries, the considered demand would be approximately of 1. 675 children and young people who need, at the moment, palliative care assistance.
If we considered that in the 2002 the Palliative Cares and Pain Control Clinic at the Children's National Hospital took care of 383 patients, this means that the coverage reached was of only 22, 86% of the potential demand.
At the moment we take care of 24,83% (416) of children that, require pediatric palliative care in the country. Perhaps the most important reason of this greater coverage has been the opening of Saint Gabriel Shelter, and therefore, the hiring of more specialized personnel, which has allowed us to cover almost all the national territory.
Being Costa Rica, at a Central American level, at the vanguard in the sector health, specially in the handling of complex pathologies and being the only country that offers a program of Pediatric Palliative Cares attention, necessarily, the rest of countries of the area requires, directly or indirectly, of our experience and services to take care of their necessities of attention within the social security system.
For that reason, if being our country the one with smaller demographic concentration and with greater health indicators, can solely takes care of 24, 83% of the demand of Pediatric Palliative Care services, we can supposed that the other countries in the region assist inferior population percentages.
Therefore, conscious that many children and adolescents need and will need our attention, we have led ourselves to this new project accomplishment: the construction of the Pediatric Palliative Cares Hospice and Diurnal Center.
