Emergency medicine and palliative care.

The emergency department cares for seriously ill patients across the trajectory of illness from diagnosis to death or cure. Emergency departments participate in critical illness trajectories that include initiation of life-sustaining therapies as well as caring for patients and families in their final moments of life. Emergency clinicians are uniquely poised to identify critical palliative care interventions to be used when patients and families are most in need with respect to symptom management, decisions regarding intervention and procedures to sustain life and participate in critically important decisions regarding withdrawing and withholding nonbeneficial life-sustaining therapies.