The dementia patient’s pathway through specialist palliative care services: Part II

The term ‘dementia palliative care’ has been adopted as a way of describing the means of appropriately addressing the palliative care needs of people with dementia and their families.¹ Caring for a loved one with end-stage dementia can present a significant emotional and physical burden for carers. The quality of palliative care for people with dementia has been identified as often suboptimal, and while this can be due to the challenging nature of dementia itself,² it is also affected by inadequate resourcing of palliative care services, as noted in Part I of this study³.