WHAT IS PALLIATIVE CARE?
Palliative care focuses on improving quality of life and supporting the patient and their family suffering from a life-threatening or chronic illness. The intent of palliative care is to help ease symptoms, pain, and side effects for patients while undergoing treatments for their illness. Palliative care is offered earlier in the disease process and can occur while the patient is still receiving curative treatment. It can be provided at home, in hospital, or in another setting such as a nursing home.
Palliative care acts as an added support to your existing team of physicians and is given in concurrence with treatments meant to treat a disease. Palliative care is a specialized medical practice that focuses on managing difficult symptoms and includes complex pain management that involves administering or managing pain medications for patients with serious illness. The palliative care team works in concert with your loved one’s own doctors and does not replace any of that care. Consultations can happen through telehealth, too.
Palliative care is best for individuals whose:
- Quality of life is suffering due to an illness
- Condition continues to worsen despite the best care of medical professionals
- Need for regular help is growing due to a worsening illness
- Trips to the doctor or hospital to address serious illness and symptoms have become more frequent
WHAT IS HOSPICE CARE?
Considered the model for quality compassionate care for people facing a life-limiting illness, hospice provides expert medical care, pain management, and emotional and spiritual support expressly tailored to a patient’s needs and wishes. Support is provided to your family as well.
Hospice focuses on caring, not curing. In most cases, care is provided in the patient’s home but may also be provided in freestanding hospice facilities, hospitals, and nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. A patient may require differing intensities of care during the course of their disease. While they may enter the program at any level of care, changes in their status may require a change in their level of care. The Medicare Hospice Benefit affords patients four levels of care to meet their clinical needs: routine home care, general inpatient care, continuous home care, and inpatient respite care.
Individuals that meet the following criteria may be eligible for hospice care:
- Not expected to recover from their condition
- Have decided to stop active treatment aimed at recovery
- Have a life expectancy of fewer than six months
Hospice services are available to anyone with any terminal illness or of any age, religion, or race. Many find that the emotional support, symptom and pain management expertise hospice offers can make huge differences in the quality of life.
WHO PROVIDES PALLIATIVE AND HOSPICE CARE?
Palliative and hospice care both utilize a holistic team approach that consists of specialized medical care focused on relief from symptoms and stress of a critical illness. The core care team involves the patient’s diagnosing physician, specially trained hospice and palliative physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses, nurses’ aides, social workers, and clergy, as well as family members. Other valuable members of the core care team include our dedicated volunteers and art and music therapists
