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The term Palliative Care (PC) is defined as “an approach that improves quality of life of patients and their families, who face problems associated with life-threatening diseases." PC is a care program with or without a healing medical goal, while Hospice is a program without conventional therapies or healing intent. Physical pain and symptom relief are the main intentions of the program; the purpose of Hospice is to offer well-being while avoiding invasive treatments with no chance of cure. (HERMES; LAMARCA, 2013).
Therefore, it is of paramount importance to approach PC as a proposal for therapeutic intervention for chronic disease patients, regardless of terminality process, in order to live with the disease in a dignified way and with quality of life (LUZ et al., 2013).
Chronic diseases are a group of diseases consisting of a long history and latency period and prolonged. They cause irreversible pathological changes with residual disability. (BARBOSA et al., 2006). By definition, Chronic Kidney Disease consists of abnormalities in the structure and/or function of the kidneys for three or more months, which can be evidenced in imaging, blood and/or urinary tests, characterized by a syndromic diagnosis of progressive and irreversible loss of renal and clearance functions.(FERNANDES et al., 2022).
The following is an investigative, exploratory, prospective study. It was based on a questionnaire application adapted from Davison (2010). Inclusion criteria were: stage 4 or 5 CKD patients, over 18 years old, undergoing hemodialysis treatment at Mafra Kidney Disease Treatment Center – MAFRA/SC, who accepted the research by signing the informed consent form. We obtained a total of 84 individuals participating during the collection period following the approval by the ethics committee in human research. The exclusion criteria were patients who, for any reason, expressed the desire to withdraw from the research
Knowledge on end-of-life care is little addressed by the team and patients undergoing dialysis; even though patients say they feel comfortable discussing quality of life, the subject of PC is not brought up due to their discomfort over it. Being a chronic renal patient on hemodialysis a patient in PC, the topic is still seen as something uncomfortable to be discussed. The importance of awareness on the subject and its demystification is important to bring more knowledge and with it more choices and treatments for patients. We also highlight the importance of more work related to end-of-life care in this specific type of treatment because the topic is still very scarce and needs more targeted work.