Pediatric Palliative Care and Pain Management

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to contribute to this Special Issue, ‘Pediatric Palliative Care and Pain Management'. Palliative care is a total approach to care that aims to improve the quality of life of patients who are facing a complex serious illness or potentially life-limiting diagnosis. Our focus is on preventing and relieving suffering through the early identification, assessment, and treatment of pain and other problems, whether physical, psychosocial, or spiritual, for the patient and their entire family. While pediatric palliative care evolved out of the field of hospice and palliative medicine, it requires a different approach to children than in adults. For each family, care is unique and is continued irrespective of the disease trajectory, treatment options chosen, or transitions in care settings. In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued its first policy statement on pediatric palliative and end-of-life care, calling for “the development of clinical policies and minimum standards that promote the welfare of infants and children living with life-threatening or terminal conditions and their families, with the goal of providing equitable and effective support for curative, life-prolonging, and palliative care”. With innovative therapies, more critically ill and medically complex patients are surviving. These neonates and children are exposed to more invasive procedures that may cause pain and may experience various forms of pain as a result of their underlying diagnosis. With this increased acceptance and understanding of the impact of untreated pain, stress, and agitation in neonates and children, multiple medical societies, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Society of Critical Care Medicine, have endorsed the importance of treating sedation, analgesia, and delirium, as well as the importance of intentional practices.

While there remains a paucity of data, research has highlighted the importance of pediatric palliative care, gaps in care, experiences of patients and families, and different structures to provide this care.

This Special Issue aims to highlight important topics related to pediatric palliative care, neonatal-perinatal palliative care, and pediatric and neonatal pain and advanced symptom management. Topics may include (but are not limited to) the following: program development (including multi-specialty/discipline collaborations); quality improvement measures in pediatric palliative care and pediatric pain management; education, training, and curriculum development in pediatric palliative care and pain management; collaborations, outcomes, and care of medically complex neonates and children (cardiology, neurology, nephrology, etc.); ethical aspects of pediatric palliative care in various countries; advanced pain and symptom management (delirium, complex sedation and analgesia, wound care, etc.); disparities in pediatric palliative care; cultural and religious dimensions of neonatal-perinatal palliative care; the short- and long-term impact of pain and stress on the developing brain; and the long-term impact of medications to treat pain and other symptoms on the developing brain.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. DonnaMaria E. Cortezzo
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Children is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.