Pediatric Palliative Care is the integral attention (biological, psychological, social, and spiritual), for children and adolescents in conditions of limited living capacities or in the terminal phase, that offers a multidisciplinary working team to these patients and their families.

Patients in the Terminal Phase

 Patients with advanced-stage illnesses, without a reasonable possibility to respond to curative treatment, in the presence of numerous problems or intense, multiple, multi-factorial, and changing symptoms, whose life prognostic is fewer than six months.

Patients with Limited Living Capacities

Patients whose illnesses, some of them progressive, do not have the possibility of curative treatment, and at the same time, entail the presence of multiple symptoms and complications that have repercussions on their quality of life. Also those that have a condition that causes for them a progressive deterioration and an increase in their dependence on their parents, caretakers, and healthcare personnel.

Children that are able to ask for/demand Palliative Care include:

• Conditions for which curative treatment is possible but also could possibly fail.
• Illnesses through which premature death can occur, but for which intensive treatment could prolong a good quality of life.
• Progressive conditions where treatment is exclusively palliative and may last for various years.
• Conditions of neurological damage, causing debility and susceptibility to complications.