Pediatric palliative care planning: models and simulation.

Paediatric palliative patients are children suffering for incurable pathologies which cause them a lot of human, clinical, psychological, ethical and spiritual problems and require special assistance. Only in recent times they have been considered as specific patients needing qualified cares. In this paper we have built up a simulation model describing paediatric palliative patients movements among the interested health facilities, more precisely hospital departments, hospice, integral home care and simple home care, and the interactions of such patients with ordinary patients in seizing places in hospital departments. The model, implemented on a personal computer by means of a specific simulation language, permits to evidence the lacks of the existing assistance network and to suggest suitable adaptations. The model has been usefully applied to Veneto region in North-East Italy.