• Cancer
• Hospital care
• Hospice care
• Service evaluation
• Supportive care
• Transitional care

We thank the authors for reading our paper and sending their comments. We agree with their title: palliative care is complex. However, their comments seem to be in contrast with this statement. They describe acute palliative care units (APCUs) in hospitals, particularly in oncological departments, as a simplistic response. We are surprised, since APCUs are not simple, They report about the ability of consulting teams in hospital. Probably they ignore the need for a specialist team involved in APCU assessment and therapeutic strategies requiring high level of expertise by physicians, nurses and other disciplines in resolving complex problems that cannot be resolved by single persons providing simple advice at a certain time of the day. Some patients with severe physical and psychosocial suffering require continuous evaluation, including imaging studies, specialist consultations and rapid changes of therapeutic regimes according to the patients’ response. They quote that hospital inpatient facilities, through palliative care network (PCN) teams, should provide advice, facilitating the activation of palliative care pathways or eventually supporting the hospital admitting teams, which are far from reality. For instance, differences have been reported.1 This approach of only a role of advisors for activating palliative care services (on average only 2–3 weeks before death!)2 does not mean resolving the present problem of a patient admitted to hospital. Indeed, do they know that …