The relationship between proxy agency and the medical decisions concerning pediatric patients in palliative care: a qualitative study.

Background: The children's agency and that exercised by parents and health professionals in palliative care, along with structural limitations imposed by the conditions of inequality, will provide a new perspective from medical anthropology and biomedicine to improve pediatric palliative care in complex therapeutic scenarios. The main purpose of the study was to analyze the ways in which pediatric patients have agency in relation to their parents and palliative care (PC) professionals within the hospital setting, as well as the structural circumstances that constrain said agency.

Method: A hospital ethnography (by means of non-participant observation and interviews) of the palliative care (PC) unit in a children's hospital was conducted over the course of six months.