Iliveproject

iLIVE is a 4-year research project funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme. It aims to develop novel, evidence–based and sustainable interventions to relieve the symptoms and suffering that occur at end of life for patients with advanced chronic illnesses and their families. On the 10th of February the iLive project was launched in Rotterdam, where during two days, more than 30 clinicians and researchers from 13 different countries, worked together to initiate this venture. About end of life care in advanced chronic illnesses An excess of 5 million people die in the EU each year, with 77% of deaths resulting from chronic illness. Although a chronic illness is a medical condition, it has a social, psychological, emotional and spiritual, and economic impact on people’s lives. It affects people in different ways. Dying from a chronic illness involves: a period of declining health, deteriorating functioning and increasing symptom load; the difficulty of recognising the imminence of death due to an omnipresent focus on diagnosis, therapy and cure; prolonged costly medical interventions, aimed at postponing death, until very late in patients’ disease trajectories, without beneficial effects but with a considerable burden for the patient; and individually and as a society, fear to face our mortality, resulting in a ‘conspiracy of silence’ around death and dying. As a result of a lack of acknowledgement of the needs of the imminently dying, many people die with pain or symptomatic stress, alone, and without structured health or social care. How we care for the elderly and the dying is perhaps the most pressing personal, social and public health issue of the 21st century. Palliative Care is aimed at improving the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain.