Proactive interdisciplinary collaboration to support child and family care needs in pediatric palliative care

Pediatric palliative care increasingly focuses on quality of life and is more often delivered in the home setting. This requires effective collaboration among various healthcare professionals, as well as with parents, within the situational care network surrounding the child.

In practice, however, collaboration remains challenging. Healthcare professionals often have limited awareness of other involved providers, experience difficulties in collaborating, or hold negative perceptions of other professionals or of collaboration itself. Closer collaboration typically emerges during crises or in the terminal phase, partly because professionals then recognize and experience the necessity of working together to provide adequate care for the child and family. Both parents and healthcare professionals emphasized the importance of initiating and aligning care earlier with all involved parties.

Aim and result

In response, we co-developed, together with parents and professionals, a structured approach for collaborative meetings. By fostering greater awareness of collaboration partners and actively organizing collaboration, these meetings contribute to improvements in the quality of pediatric palliative care.