Palliative Care

Palliative care is an area of healthcare that focuses on relieving and preventing the suffering of clients.

We would formulate a plan of care to relieve suffering in all areas of a client’s life. This multidisciplinary approach allows the palliative care team to address physical, emotional, spiritual, and social concerns that arise with advanced illness.

The focus is on a client’s quality of life. The goal is to improve quality of life for both the patient and the family as they are the central system for care.

Palliative care:

• provides relief from pain, shortness of breath, nausea, and other distressing symptoms;
• affirms life and regards dying as a normal process;
• intends neither to hasten nor to postpone death;
• integrates the psychological and spiritual aspects of patient care;
• offers a support system to help patients live as actively as possible;
• offers a support system to help the family cope;
• uses a team approach to address the needs of patients and their families;
• will enhance quality of life;
• is applicable early in the course of illness, in conjunction with other therapies that are intended to prolong life, such as chemotherapy or radiation therapy.

While palliative care may seem to offer a broad range of services, the goals of palliative treatment are concrete: relief from suffering, treatment of pain and other distressing symptoms, psychological and spiritual care, a support system to help the individual live as actively as possible, and a support system to sustain and rehabilitate the individual’s family