Palliative care is an interdisciplinary medical caregiving approach aimed at optimizing quality of life and mitigating suffering among people with serious, complex, and often terminal illnesses.
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17 Facts About Palliative care
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Palliative care is appropriate for individuals with serious illnesses across the age spectrum and can be provided as the main goal of care or in tandem with curative treatment.
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Palliative care can be provided in a variety of contexts, including hospitals, outpatient, skilled-nursing, and home settings.
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Palliative care's main focus is to improve the quality of life for those with chronic illnesses.
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Palliative care can be delivered at any stage of illness alongside other treatments with curative or life-prolonging intent and is not restricted to people receiving end-of-life care.
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Historically, palliative care services were focused on individuals with incurable cancer, but this framework is applied to other diseases, like severe heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative conditions.
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Palliative care can be initiated in a variety of care settings, including emergency rooms, hospitals, hospice facilities, or at home.
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Hospice care focuses on comfort and psychological support and curative therapies are not pursued.
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Field of palliative care grew out of the hospice movement, which is commonly associated with Dame Cicely Saunders, who founded St Christopher's Hospice for the terminally ill in 1967, and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross who published her seminal work "On Death and Dying" in 1969.
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Advances in palliative care have since inspired a dramatic increase in hospital-based palliative care programs.
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Medications used in palliative care can be common medications but used for a different indication based on established practices with varying degrees of evidence.
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An interdisciplinary palliative care team consisting of a mental health professional, social worker, counselor, as well as spiritual support such as a chaplain, can play important roles in helping people and their families cope using various methods such as counseling, visualization, cognitive methods, drug therapy and relaxation therapy to address their needs.
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Pediatric palliative care is family-centered, specialized medical care for children with serious illnesses that focuses on mitigating the physical, emotional, psychosocial, and spiritual suffering associated with illness to ultimately optimize quality of life.
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In Great Britain and many other countries all palliative care is offered free, either through the National Health Service or through charities working in partnership with the local health services.
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Palliative care services are most often provided in acute care hospitals organized around an interdisciplinary consultation service, with or without an acute inpatient palliative care unit.
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Physicians practicing palliative care do not always receive support from the people they are treating, family members, healthcare professionals or their social peers.
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Palliative care was the subject of the 2018 Netflix short documentary, End Game by directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman about terminally ill patients in a San Francisco hospital and features the work of palliative care physician, BJ Miller.
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