Comprehensive Care for People with Epilepsy

VOLUME 16
Comprehensive Care describes an approach to diagnosing and treating people with epilepsy (though not confined to this condition) with a view of the patient as an integral human being, comprising both their seizures and the psychical and social situation. Comprehensive Care links intervention in the narrower medical sense (e.g. antiepileptic drug treatment or surgery) with non-medical intervention (e.g. counselling, offering information, psy-chosocial assistance, rehabilitation), thus implying multiprofessional structures in diagnosis and treatment. Comprehensive Care inquires into every treatment’s goals, whilst including the patients’ (and their relatives’) subjective evaluations and perspective’s.
This includes early considerations of benefits versus risks for the patient, the ultimate question being what quality of life will be attained and how much independent life and employment will be feasible. Comprehensive Care does not necessarily need to be associated with elevated cost, as many epilepsy centres have enough knowledge, imagination, and staff for this purpose, the problem being how to combine and use existing resources most effectively.