Section 1

Conceptual Aspects of Palliative Care and Different Region Applications

**3**

**Chapter 1**

Everybody

*Georg Bollig*

**Abstract**

Palliative Care Education for

This chapter is about palliative care education for everybody including both professional health care workers and all citizens. A six-step approach to life-long palliative care education (as first described by Bollig in 2008 and published as a conference poster in 2009 and a book in German in 2010) will be proposed and discussed. The chapter will summarize the public knowledge approach to palliative care implementation (Bollig 2008) and other strategies to educate the public about palliative care. The concept of Last Aid courses for citizens will be introduced, and international experiences with this concept will be discussed. A possible combination of Last Aid courses and the compassionate community approach might

improve palliative care provision in the community.

compassionate communities, Last Aid course

**1. Introduction and background**

of-life care for others [1, 2].

**Keywords:** Palliative care, worldwide, education, citizens, public health,

Our world is in constant change, and today, there is an enormous pressure by the mass media and the Internet to handle a massive amount of information every single day. To keep up with the current knowledge is therefore not an easy task. There is an increasing focus on life-long learning. This applies also to the field of palliative care and end-of-life care. Taking into account the increasing number of frail elderly people and people with demanding care needs in the future, it is obvious that all health care professionals should know how to provide palliative care and end-of-life care. But why should everybody be interested in learning palliative care when there are specialists to handle that? Due to an increased overall life expectancy, the demographic change and a growing awareness of palliative care needs of patients with nonmalignant diseases as, for example, terminal stages of heart-diseases, kidney diseases, neurological diseases, etc., an expected enormous number of people with a need for palliative care cannot be treated by specialized palliative care providers alone. In order to provide good palliative care to all in need, all citizens have to join in to help to provide palliative care for everybody in need. According to Kellehear, everybody has a responsibility of providing end-

Although many people would prefer to die at home, death has moved to happen mostly in institutions like hospitals or nursing homes within the last decades. Thus, communities and health care services have to prepare for an increasing number of people in need of palliative care and end-of-life care at home and in nursing homes [3–5]. The health care systems around the world will not be able to cope with this
