If children cannot be cured, they still can be helped. Hospice is a house where life is preserved, whatever the rest of a life may be.

 

We often speak of hope, struggle, desire to live. We tell about successful treatment of oncopathology. We ask to believe in better. However, let's be frank: there are children who will not overcome their illness. There are parents who have to bury their children. During last days and months of their lives children and their families need help and support.

 

Since 1987, the World Health Organization (WHO) made palliative care a branch of its own. In 1998, the WHO designated palliative care for children a separate branch of medicine. According to the WHO, palliative care for children is active all-round help to the body, mind, and soul of an ill child, also including help to this child's family.

 

Palliative care is a general notion, an approach that allows to improve the quality of life of patients who face life-threatening diseases, as well as of their families. Palliative care may be provided in various forms: a pain-treating specialist at a hospital; a palliative help room in a clinic; a palliative care department; and also hospice. Palliative care starts when a patient gets to know about a life-threatening disease, and hospice is one of the stages of providing palliative care. Hospice is aimed at creating for patients, at the end of their lives, conditions as close to home conditions as possible. The main thing, however, is that people are not dying in hospices: they are living there.

 

In Ukraine there are now almost 20 hospices and palliative care centers for adults but the discussion about the need to develop palliative care for children is just starting.

 

Since 2005, there is a children's room at the adult hospice attached to the Kiev City Oncological Dispensory (69 Verkhovynna Street). It admits children from all over Ukraine.

 

A children's hospice for 15 was opened in December 2013 in Ivano-Frankivsk.

 

The Project's Goal is to help develop and to organize capacity for palliative care for children for patients at the children's oncology department of the National Cancer Institute.  

 

The Project Implements:

1. Information-and-consultation line.
2. Education and training of medical personnel.
3. Organization of children's hospice and visiting services.