Palliative Care
A serious illness, such as diabetes or COPD or congestive heart failure, doesn't just affect your health. It affects every aspect of your life. Palliative care services at Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic provides additional care for you during your treatment, and helping to ease any suffering.
What is palliative care?
Palliative care, also known as palliative medicine, is specialized medical care for people living with serious illness. It is focused on providing patients with relief from the symptoms and stress of a serious illness—whatever the diagnosis. The goal is to improve quality of life for both the patient and the family.
Support would include:
- Specialized medical care for people living with serious illnesses
- Focused on providing patients with relief from the symptoms and stress of a serious illness
- Appropriate at any stage in a serious illness
- Provided simultaneously with curative treatment
- Care that starts with understanding what matters most to the patient and their loved ones, and then builds a care plan to achieve these goals
Goals of palliative care
Goals of palliative care directly address what is most important to those with advanced illness:
- Communication and education about the illness
- Decisions about treatment preferences
- Documentation of goals
- Advance directives
- Pain and symptom management
- Caregiver support
Palliative care team
The palliative care team is a multidisciplinary group of healthcare providers who are skilled in addressing issues faced by seriously ill patients and their families. Our team includes physicians who are board-certified in palliative medicine and nurse practitioners, who coordinate with the primary care physicians and other specialists to integrate goals of palliative care into the existing treatment plan.
The palliative care team includes:
- Palliative care physicians and/or providers
- Nurse practitioners or skilled nurse clinicians
- Social workers
- Chaplains
- Case managers
- Home health services