What's in Your Story? Pediatric Palliative Care in a New York Hospital

This thesis is centered around the pediatric palliative care experience in a large, urban hospital setting. Through my role as a social work student, I aimed to answer the question: what shapes a child’s (and, by extension, their family’s) palliative care and end-of-life experience? The four factors I identified include: the nature of their diagnosis, the child’s age and level of psychosocial development, the child and family’s social location, and the bias they face within the healthcare system. This thesis examines how these factors are interconnected and how they come together and write a child’s palliative care story.