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Rehabilitation in Palliative Care

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Textbook of Palliative Care

Abstract

In the context of palliative care, rehabilitation aims to improve quality of life for people living with life-limiting illness by enabling them to be as active and productive as possible with minimum dependence on others, regardless of their life expectancy (NICE. Guidance on cancer services: improving supportive and palliative care for adults with cancer. The manual. National Institute for Clinical Excellence, London, 2004). Palliative rehabilitation helps enable people to participate as fully as possible in all aspects of their daily lives. It represents an important route for people to fulfill meaningful goals, maintain dignity and adapt constructively to the uncertainty and loss that is often intrinsic in the lived experience of advancing illness. In its simplest sense, palliative rehabilitation is about enabling people to live fully until they die (Tiberini and Richardson, Rehabilitative palliative care: enabling people to live fully until they die. A challenge for the 21st century. Hospice, 2015. ISBN:978-1-871978-91-9). Rehabilitation in palliative care combines the specialist contribution of physiotherapists and occupational therapists together with the interdisciplinary practice of “rehabilitative palliative care.”

Palliative rehabilitation is ‘the transformation of the dying into the living... the restoration of a patient to a person’. (Doyle et al. 2004)

Principles in the Context of Life-Limiting Illness, Practices for the Interdisciplinary Team, and the Specialist Contribution of Physiotherapy and Occupational Therapy

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. St Michael’s Hospice, Hastings, UK

    Rebecca Tiberini

  2. Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust and Marie Curie Hospice Hampstead, Florence Nightingale Scholar, London, UK

    Karen Turner

  3. St Christopher’s Hospice, London, UK

    Helena Talbot-Rice

Authors
  1. Rebecca Tiberini
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  2. Karen Turner
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  3. Helena Talbot-Rice
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rebecca Tiberini .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Medicine,Palliative Care, HammondCare, The University of Sydney School of Medicine, Sydney, Australia

    Roderick Duncan MacLeod

  2. VUB-UGhent End-of-Life Care Research Group, Department of Family Medicine and Chronic Care and Department of Clinical Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels, Belgium

    Lieve Van den Block

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Tiberini, R., Turner, K., Talbot-Rice, H. (2019). Rehabilitation in Palliative Care. In: MacLeod, R., Van den Block, L. (eds) Textbook of Palliative Care. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77740-5_34

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