Palliative Home Care in Pediatric Patients: Current Innovations and Future Challenges
A special issue of Children (ISSN 2227-9067). This special issue belongs to the section "Pediatric Anesthesiology, Pain Medicine and Palliative Care".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 March 2026 | Viewed by 310
Special Issue Editor
2. Centre for Children’s Health Research, Queensland University of Technology, South Brisbane, QLD 4101, Australia
Interests: paediatric palliative care
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Children and adolescents with life-limiting diseases suffer from various symptoms at the end of their lives, which can impact quality of life and cause suffering. This extends to the whole family system, including siblings. Symptoms can cause distress, including pain, agitation, anxiety, fatigue, seizures, and various gastrointestinal symptoms (e.g., feed intolerance, anorexia, nausea, and vomiting). In recent years, there has been an increasing capacity to support children receiving palliative care at home. Palliative care at home has a number of benefits, including less disruption to family life, freedom from the hospital environment, freedom to have visitors at any time, and the child’s own preferences, including food and parental choice. One important benefit of being at home includes the parents' ability to be more particular about the timing of analgesia; however, it can be difficult to provide nursing care and access to clinical staff for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at home. In this context, there can be benefits of being cared for in a tertiary children’s hospital, a hospital close to home, or a children’s hospice. Elements of home life can still be integrated into both hospital and hospice settings. This is especially the case for children’s hospices. This Special Issue invites you to contribute original research articles and reviews on “pediatric palliative home care”. If you would like to contribute, please feel free to contact us.
Dr. Anthony Herbert
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Children is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- children
- adolescents
- palliative home care
- pain
- life-limiting
- end-of-life care
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