18/09/2025
The 2025 SECPAL International Congress was conceived as an opportunity to rethink and expand palliative care beyond the traditional healthcare model, recognizing its complex, multidimensional, and deeply human nature. The main ideas can be grouped into several key themes:
1. Interdisciplinarity and diversity of professionals
Excellence in palliative care is not limited to healthcare professionals but requires the inclusion of diverse profiles: economists, managers, journalists, third-sector professionals, researchers, pharmacists, and educators, among others. This diversity helps expand the focus beyond biomedicine, incorporating social, cultural, ethical, and economic dimensions.
2. Technology, ethics, and new social realities
Artificial intelligence and digital technologies emerge as promising tools but raise critical ethical challenges regarding privacy, dignity, and equity of access. Another central concern is how media portray palliative care and shape public perceptions of dying. The congress also stressed the need to respond to cultural and linguistic diversity, migrant workers, and vulnerable groups such as people with dementia, ALS, or children and adolescents with serious illnesses.
3. Education, teaching, and research
Participants emphasized the need for improved training: not only technical expertise but also bioethics, communication, cultural sensitivity, and digital literacy. Research priorities include developing quality indicators for postgraduate programs in palliative care, studying benefits and risks of new technologies, and designing applied studies for populations such as children, people with dementia, and ALS patients.
4. Person-, family-, and community-centered care
Palliative care should be integrated across all stages of life, not only at the very end. Families and caregivers are recognized both as central actors in care and as individuals in need of support. The congress highlighted the importance of professional self-care, fostering strong teams, and creating healthy work environments that address emotional strain.
5. Health policy, economics, and equity
Discussions addressed how palliative care is funded, what organizational models ensure accessibility, and how public health policies can embed palliative care as an essential system component. Justice and equity are guiding principles: guaranteeing that no one is excluded for cultural, social, or economic reasons.
6. Innovative and unconventional practices
Initiatives such as Death Cafés—community spaces for dialogue about death—were presented as ways to reduce stigma and normalize end-of-life conversations. Complementary approaches like music therapy, meaning-centered interventions, and spiritual support therapies were also explored.
Conclusions
The congress aims to advance toward a model of palliative care that is more humanized, inclusive, ethically grounded, technologically informed, and institutionally recognized. Interdisciplinarity is not seen as a buzzword but as a concrete strategy to face current challenges—aging, chronic illness, social inequality—and future ones such as technological change, cultural diversity, and evolving social expectations around end-of-life care.
Autor: Carmen Garcia