A conversation with Dr. Sergi Navarro on the future of paediatric palliative care and the PALLIAKID project
27th May 2024
Welcome – please can you tell us a bit about yourself?
I’m Sergi Navarro and I’m a paediatrician and the head of the Children’s Palliative Care (CPC) and Complex Care Team at the Hospital Sant Joan De Déu in Barcelona and Director of the Casia Sofia Centre. I’m also the president of the Spanish Paediatric Palliative Care Association. Here in Barcelona we have a team of more than thirty CPC professionals and part of what we are trying to do is challenging people’s ‘old fashioned’ concepts that palliative care for children is just about end of life care. It’s much more than that. It’s about improving the quality of life for children with many different rare diseases, and this is one of our challenges.
I am also the coordinator and the Principal Investigator of the PALLIAKID project. It’s a real team effort with an exciting expert consortium. When we put the consortium together we included five clinical sites which are part of the European Children’s Hospitals Organisation (ECHO) network. We also included the authors of specific tools such as those for needs assessment and Advance Care Planning and we have the privilege of being associated with two of the most influential organisations in palliative care – the European Association of Palliative Care (EAPC) and the International Children’s Palliative Care Network (ICPCN).
