Paediatric palliative care: What the Oasis experimentation taught me

The Oasis, a French hospice for children and adolescents, had been opened near Toulouse for 24 months (between 2010 and 2012) on behalf of a national health program settled to improve palliative care. During two years, a team from the French Red Cross, the hospital's paediatric pain and palliative care team and volunteers from the local association have tried to establish the paediatric concept of palliative care in the Midi-Pyrenees region. Here we describe how it worked and was managed on a global and institutional point of view. Then, we will try to understand what did not work and what could possibly have contributed to the low occupation rate and to the hasty governmental decision to close the House. We will discuss the concept of paediatric palliative care, the children and family's needs at that time of life, and what should be done to provide efficient palliative care. If this attempt to open a paediatric hospice in France was not conclusive, it does not question the need for paediatric palliative respite solutions. Other kinds of organizations deserve to be experimented. (C) 2013 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.