Pediatric Palliative Care Update

Dear Colleagues,

It is a great honor to invite you to collaborate on this second Special Issue on Pediatric Palliative Medicine. We are hoping to leverage the experience of seasoned clinicians and the emerging young talent throughout the world to build on the brilliant contributions found in the first Issue, compiled by Dr. Stefan Friederichsdorf and published in 2018.

We are hoping to create a broad-based, international, interdisciplinary collection of essays on the most pressing problems in Pediatric Palliative Medicine—as noted by Dr. Friederichsdorf, only a fraction of the 21 million children with life-limiting or life-threatening disorders requiring palliative care receive adequate symptom relief and other important interventions by trained healthcare professionals, and that was before this unprecedented time in the history of humanity, when natural disasters and civil unrest in many low-income and middle-income countries have caused the forced displacement of millions of families throughout the globe, with the attendant significant disruptions in basic healthcare provision. 

To make matters worse, the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic has caused a “concussive wave” in palliative medicine, forcing rapid decisions, in many cases with reallocation of resources, causing abrupt dissolution and dispersion of established palliative care teams and complicating the organization of new services, despite significant need—particularly in low and mid-income settings. The full public health impact of this phenomenon will not be understood for a very long time, but the challenges we are facing will without doubt promote collaboration and creativity as we strive to make holistic, optimal symptom control an important part of universal health coverage and other global initiatives for every child, in every setting.

Our vision is to update palliative aspects of neonatal and pediatric specialty care; recognize factors contributing to physical, psychosocial, and spiritual suffering in babies, school-aged children, adolescents and young adults transitioning to adult-based health care; and to explore ways to foster resilience in our patients and in their families, in our teams, in our healthcare systems, and in ourselves. Pediatric palliative care is difficult, beautiful, important work…we need your expertise.

Dr. Regina Okhuysen-Cawley
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. 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 collection website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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.