Healthcare and illness care needs are adapting to changing social conditions. Modifications in family structures, precariousness in all spheres of life, and the variability of personal and collective values position each person differently in illness processes.
In today's fast-paced culture, it is difficult to accept uncertainty or simply acknowledge that treatments for illnesses sometimes do not work. Understanding that alleviating, accompanying, and accepting are the main tasks when there is nothing left to do. These often invisible tasks bring humanity to healthcare, even if they do not appear in activity reports like interventions, diagnostic tests, or successful treatments.
Professionals from the Palliative Care Team of OSI Araba have provided valuable insights into approaching the end of life, accompanying patients and their families, and practicing compassionate medicine in complex times. The work of these care and health professionals is as essential for a good life (which, of course, includes a good death) as decent housing, healthy and accessible food, or the warmth of homes.
Palliative Care is not well understood, especially by administrators in Araba, where the scarcity of care resources is a clear, top-level problem today.
With a population of over 80,000 people aged 65 and above in Araba, it is estimated that more than 3,000 individuals annually require or will require palliative care. However, currently, Araba lacks any medium-to-long-term palliative care beds. This situation starkly contrasts with other territories in the CAV: Bizkaia has 75 specialized beds, and Gipuzkoa has 30.
Currently, Osakidetza can only offer palliative care at patients' homes through the strained Primary Care system or at Santiago Hospital with a very limited number of beds. In Vitoria-Gasteiz, continuous medical attention, the much-desired 24/7 service, has been outsourced to a company with staff external to the network and with evident training deficiencies.
This severe shortage of resources has persisted since 2019, when the agreement with the center that housed patients needing extended stays was terminated. For seven years, managers from Osakidetza and IFBS have been shifting responsibility without proposing any effective solution.
