Ethical Guidelines in Palliative Care for Children: Analysis of Russian Legislation and Methodological Recommendations

Abstract

Palliative care for children is interdisciplinary medical subspecialty, which have some spe­cific ethical problems. This article presents a content analysis and a comparative analysis of Russian legislative documents and educational materials regulating palliative care to chil­dren. A comparison was also made with documents that regulate (both directive and re­commendatory) the provision of palliative care for children in comparison with palliative care for the adult population. We found that the ethically significant biomedical features of palliative conditions in children, in comparison with adults, are reflected in the structure of the normative and ethical regulation of palliative care for children, especially within the framework of the deontological approach widely used in it, and to a lesser extent within the virtue ethics approach. At the same time, it is shown that the consequentialist approach is not very sensitive to such specifics and is quite universal.