Comunidades compasivas en cuidados paliativos: Revisión de experiencias internacionales y descripción de una iniciativa en Medellín, Colombia

Objective: To describe worldwide experiences of compassionate communities that serve as a complement to palliative care services and show the advances of the proyect “Compassionate Medellin, everybody with you” conducted in Colombia. Methodology: A narrative review of the literature was conducted through a search in Medline, Ovid, Sciencedirect, Embase, Mediclatina, Health source y Google and manual exploration of articles. The keywords “compassionate communities” or “communities” or “support networks” and “palliative care” or “end-of-life care” were used. Results: The idea of the compassionate communities originated from the concept of healthy cities proposed by the WHO. It has since permeated public health and, particularly, palliative care. Compassionate communities seek to complement health care services through the empowerment of communities towards the care of their members facing advanced illness and the end-of-life and the development of caregiving networks. The article describes the development of this movement and a series of international experiences, as well as the initiative conducted in Medellin, Colombia. Conclusions: The main aim of compassionate communities in the world is to improve the quality of life of people with advanced illness and facing end-of-life, through the empowerment of their social group in the tasks and needs of care they may have. These communities have emerged throughout the world and achieve their goals using different strategies. Their efforts might be useful not only to empower communities in caregiving actions, but to also successfully complement palliative care assistance, particularly in contexts where these are still under development.