Improving Your Quality of Life
Our Palliative Care services are dedicated to improving the quality of life for patients facing serious or chronic illnesses. We focus on pain and symptom management, providing tailored care to relieve discomfort such as pain, nausea, breathlessness, fatigue, or insomnia. Using a combination of medications and supportive strategies, we address even the most challenging symptoms to ensure that our patients find relief.
Advance care planning is a cornerstone of our approach, helping patients articulate their healthcare preferences through advance directives, living wills, and POLST or DNR forms. These discussions empower individuals to make informed decisions about their care, particularly during emergencies or when facing complex medical situations.
Our team also offers emotional and psychological support to patients and families, helping them navigate the challenges of serious illness. We provide spiritual care to address existential concerns, guiding patients and families as they explore meaning and purpose in difficult times. For those nearing the end of life, we collaborate with hospice services to ensure comfort, dignity, and peace.
Palliative care supports patients managing a variety of conditions, including cancer, advanced heart failure, COPD, emphysema, neurological disorders, and chronic pain syndromes such as neuropathic pain and fibromyalgia. We also assist individuals recovering from strokes, managing frailty in aging, or navigating multimorbidity and cognitive decline. Our comprehensive approach emphasizes compassionate, patient-centered care to provide support at every stage.
Services
- Pain and symptom management: Pain management, such as providing relief related to chronic or terminal illness, symptom relief such as nausea, vomiting, fatigue, breathlessness, and insomnia through medication and supportive care strategies, and managing difficult symptoms.
- Advance care planning: Assisting patients with creating advance directives (living wills, durable power of attorney) to express their healthcare preferences, goals of care conversations. Assisting in the completion of forms such as Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders or Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST), which guide care decisions in emergencies.
- Emotional and psychological support: providing emotional and psychological support to patients and their families, helping them cope with serious illness.
- Spiritual care: Addressing the spiritual and existential concerns of patients and families. Helping patients explore their spiritual concerns as they approach the end of life.
- End-of-life care: When a patient reaches a stage where curative treatments are no longer effective, palliative care teams may refer patients to hospice services for more intensive end-of-life care focused on comfort and dignity.
Conditions
- Cancer: Pain and symptom management related to cancer
- Cardiovascular disease: Heart failure, especially when it becomes advanced and difficult to manage, which limits daily activities
- Respiratory diseases: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), emphysema, pulmonary fibrosis, advanced lung diseases such as lung cancer or interstitial lung disease
- Neurological disorders: Symptom management for neurological diseases, such as intractable pain, spasticity, and difficulty swallowing
- Chronic pain: Cancer pain, including pain from tumors or the side effects of treatments, pain related to conditions such as osteoarthritis, back pain, fibromyalgia, and for patients with conditions such as sickle cell disease, neuropathic pain, and complex regional pain syndrome
- Stroke: Post-stroke recovery, speech difficulty, and paralysis. Frailty in aging: multimorbidity, mobility issues, and cognitive decline
FAQs
What Is Palliative Care?
Palliative care is specialized medical care that focuses on providing relief from the symptoms and stress of serious illness. The goal is to improve quality of life for both the patient and their family by managing pain, addressing emotional and psychological needs, and supporting patients in making informed decisions.
When Should I Consider Palliative Care?
Palliative care is appropriate for individuals with serious, chronic, or life-limiting illnesses such as cancer, heart failure, kidney disease, dementia, or COPD. It can be provided at any stage of the illness, alongside curative or life-prolonging treatments.
Is Palliative Care the Same as Hospice Care?
Palliative care and hospice care both focus on comfort and quality of life, but they are not the same. Palliative care can be provided at any stage of illness and alongside curative treatments, while hospice care is a type of palliative care provided when a person is nearing the end of life and is no longer seeking curative treatments.
