Avera Palliative Care
Palliative care is a special approach to the care of people who live with chronic, life-threatening or terminal illness. The focus is on providing quality of life to patients with advanced chronic disease or terminal illness. This ensures comfort and dignity for the patient, and gives support to the family.
Palliative care assists in coordination of patient care during treatment of the illness. This includes management of pain and physical symptoms, care and empathy for emotional suffering, loss and bereavement. Palliative care helps the patient, and those who love and care for the patient, deal with the uncertainties of a serious illness. The palliative care team includes specially trained physicians, nurses, social workers and chaplains who have experience in the care of patients with serious life-threatening disease.
Palliative care focuses on the patient’s wishes and allows the patient to have a clear say in his or her care. The Avera Palliative Care team members assist the patient and family in defining their wishes and facilitate discussion about health care and end-of-life decisions.
The focus of palliative care begins well before the patient requires hospice care. Hospice care is specifically designed for those who have reached the last stage of life. Palliative care is appropriate at any stage of a serious illness. Services may address managing lifestyle goals around new physical limits, finding meaning in illness, managing pain and other symptoms, dealing with new family issues, finding support for a caregiver and reevaluating changing goals of care.
Palliative care benefits the patient through:
Managing difficult symptoms
- Lessening pain, nausea, anxiety, fatigue, depression, shortness of breath, loss of appetite, constipation and other symptoms of serious illness or side effects of treatment
Addressing changing goals of care
- Helping the patient consider care options and make decisions about quality of life
- Interpreting the benefits and burdens of care such as tests, surgeries or medication
- Helping determine when or if to begin or discontinue treatments
- Assisting in the understanding of the disease process and the prognosis of the disease
Enhancing patient and family support
- Helping identify what is important to the patient and his or her family and conveying this to those who participate in the patient’s care
- Supporting communication in complicated family situations
- Providing spiritual and emotional support
- Promoting well-being and peace of mind
- Promoting the best quality of life
- If death is near, helping all involved create meaning
Assisting with hospital discharge
- Helping with needed referrals for care at home or another setting
- Coordinating insurance or community services
Palliative care is Avera’s way of caring for and supporting the patient and his or her family through serious illness and critical decisions related to health care and/or end of life. Avera’s team of palliative care specialists is available to support physical, emotional and spiritual needs.