Palliative Care Is Not Hospice

But they can work together for the patient and family

Palliative Medicine is compassionate care of the whole person and those who love and care for the person. This means that the patient and family’s physical, emotional and spiritual needs are considered, with an emphasis on preserving dignity and improving their quality of life. Palliative Medicine can be provided along with aggressive, curative medical care and offers the possibility of healing when cure may not be possible.

Palliative Medicine can be helpful to anyone living with a serious illness. They accept and support the choices the patient and family make about medical care and will assist all involved in communicating these choices to the patient’s medical team.

Palliative care is a nascent specialty. The American Board of Medical Specialties only started offering a certification exam in 2008, according to the Center to Advance Palliative Care.

There are only about 3,000 board-certified palliative care specialists in the US, in spite of the growing need for this service.

Given the scarcity of specialists in this area, we are fortunate to have a palliative care team and consult service at Hartford Hospital.

Their palliative care team includes a doctor, nurse practitioners, social workers, and chaplains.

Hartford Hospital’s Palliative Medicine Consult Service offers the following services:

Palliative care, value speaking, is about the long game. But it has been proven to lessen the costs involved in long-term care. According to a study published earlier this year in the American Cancer Society’s CA journal, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac.21230/

Palliative care applied quickly after diagnosis was associated “with significantly fewer ED visits, hospital admissions, hospital deaths, and ICU admissions.”

“Patients who were referred to palliative care earlier and as outpatients had better end-of-life care compared with those referred later or as inpatients,” the study read.

Dr Robert leads Baylor Healthcare System’s Supportive and Palliative Care program, now recognized as one of the nation’s three best. When he is asked about palliative care with the following question, “isn’t that just hospice care?” No,” Fine says, “it fills the space between acute aggressive treatment and hospice and can be simultaneous with a treatment.”

Perhaps the largest obstacle facing palliative care is awareness. According,

Fully 70 percent of U.S. adults were unaware of the service. And once they learned about it, roughly the same amount said they thought it was vital for end of life care.

Doctors who practice it, meanwhile, are hopeful that the shift from fee-for-volume to fee-for-value will boost the importance of palliative care. Studies have shown that a 300-bed hospital can save $1.3 million on pharmacy, lab, and intensive care costs with an effective palliative care program. Baylor has cut its Medicare costs by between 20 and 25 percent, which Fine attributes to the program.

Dr. Amy Kelley, an assistant professor of Geriatrics and Palliative Care at Baylor is a staunch advocate of the program.

“This is about spending a little time together trying to understand the individualized goals for that person,” Kelley said. “We can step back and look at the different medical options and say if the most important thing is to have some time at home and you’re not in pain and you’re with your kids, well, we can’t change that you’re going to die from cancer. But we can change this chemotherapy to another one so you can get out of the hospital.”■

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http://www.harthosp.org/palliative/default.aspx