Simone Pizzi is the director of the regional reference center for pain therapy and pediatric palliative care (it has its headquarters at the University Hospital of the Marche) strongly committed to building an assistance network, convinced as he is that “when healing is impossible, healing remains a task that passes less and less through cold, invasive directors of technique and more and more through warm and discreet gestures of tenderness”.
What is pediatric palliative care?
“Palliative care deals with children and their families with the aim of making them live as well as possible, guaranteeing them a good quality of life and as normal a life as possible. They are a very new area of pediatric medicine, they take care of children who they did not exist until some time ago, because they had no life expectancy. Today, thanks to research, advances in science and technology, many of them manage to live for days, months, sometimes years and pass into adulthood. , while maintaining a picture of incurability. They represent the result of what technological, scientific and medical progress has made available.”
What is the situation in our region?
“In the Marche region alone, around 600 children and their families are incurable, and almost half of them require specific treatments. In the region there are already many unique professionals dedicated to palliative care. However, it is necessary to apply organizational models to guarantee them throughout the Marche region, as required by law 38/2010 also implemented by the Marche Region, there are more than 20 million children in need of pediatric palliative care, 8 million of whom need specialist palliative care. “.
What is the status of the research?
“In the world of pediatric palliative care, research has exploded in the last ten years. Organizational models have been published that allow the expected objectives to be brought to clinical practice, through an organized system defined by a network of services accessible to the child and family My goal is to complete the construction of the center which will be fundamental for the entire pediatric network in the Marche and I would like the staff it will be equipped with to be duly trained.”
Franco Veroli
