Palliative Care

Palliative care is a person-centered strategy for care where the patient is treated with full respect, understanding and appreciation. Palliative care provides a humanizing context to patient care and treatment as opposed to a traditional, disease-centered approach where the primary goal is to cure. The primary goal in palliative care is to relieve suffering through treatment and relief of distressing symptoms. Success is a about enabling the patient to live as fully and comfortably as possible with his/her illness. Instead of focusing on the disease, palliative care focuses on the patient and his/her family. The fact that people are living longer with chronic illness further underscores the need for sophisticated palliative care.

Palliative Care Versus Hospice Care

While many techniques of palliative care are used in the care of hospice patients, palliative care is different from hospice in that it is in no way limited to people at the end of life. In fact, palliative care is intended to empower patients while they manage the course of any chronic illness, optimizing their quality of life by anticipating, preventing and treating their suffering.

Like hospice care, palliative care seeks to address a person’s physical, social and spiritual needs, and facilitates patient autonomy and empowerment by strengthening access to information and respecting a patient’s choices and wishes. Unlike hospice care, however, palliative care supports the patient’s and family’s goals for curative treatment and longevity.

Palliative Care and Curative Therapies and Medications

Patients undergoing curative treatment are ideally suited for the support of palliative care. Pain should never be accepted as a “normal” part of either growing older or living with a serious condition. Pain is real and there are proven techniques for managing it.

Many people fear pain medication will hasten the dying process or leave patients in a drug-induced fog. The reality is that often pain itself triggers high levels of stress and anxiety that worsen a patient’s overall condition. A study published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management found that sophisticated pain management techniques can literally lengthen life, sometimes by months for many patients.

Receiving Palliative Care

Palliative care can be accessed in a health care system with a designated palliative care department by physicians and nurse practitioners certified in palliative care. These are typically consultative services that can be ordered by a primary care physician or requested by the patient and family.

Community-based palliative care in the home can also be provided by designated hospice organizations that also have a palliative care program.

Rafael Sciullo, President and CEO, Family Hospice and Palliative Care