What is Palliative Care?
Palliative care is the active total care of patients whose disease is not responsive to curative treatment. Palliative care is interdisciplinary, team-based care that helps alleviate pain and symptoms to improve quality of life. Palliative care enhances an individual’s overall well being by addressing physical, emotional, social and spiritual needs during a life-limiting or life-challenging illness. Palliative care can be used to help people from the point of diagnosis of serious or chronic disease, even as effort to cure continue.
Palliative comes from the word palliate, which means to ease. Palliative care is also called comfort care, supportive care, and symptom management. Palliative care is the treatment of symptoms or suffering caused by a serious illness that cannot be cured. The care given is to improve the quality of life of these seriously ill patients, alleviate pain, and provide comfort. Sometimes, the care given is to ease the burden of symptoms caused by the disease or other treatments, such as pain, nausea and breathlessness. Palliative care can take place along with treatments given for various medical conditions, and is appropriate at any stage of a serious illness. Palliative care includes easing psychological, social, and spiritual problems related to the disease or its treatment and helping with physical, spiritual, and emotional worries, stress, feelings of despair, and pain. It provides a calm, caring, and quiet environment geared towards meeting the needs of patients and their families at a
Palliative care is both a philosophy of care and a highly structured system of care. The goal of palliative care is to relieve suffering and improve the quality of life for patients with advanced illness. It includes the physical aspects of care as well as the emotional, social and spiritual needs of the patient and family.
The goal of palliative care is to ensure that the patient is as pain and symptom-free as possible. The patient’s medical needs are cared for by professional nursing personnel and certified nursing assistants under the direction of the patient’s personal physician. Social and psychological needs are attended to by social work professionals, while volunteers supplement these activities with the patient’s families. Spiritual needs are addressed when requested by the patients and are dealt with through the minister of choice, or by the Hospice Chaplain. Working as a team, these professionals, along with the patient’s primary caregiver, work to assure that the patient receives the proper care and achieves the best possible quality of life.
