Step 9: Understanding Palliative Care & Hospice Services

Advantages of Palliative Care

Effective Pain Management
First and foremost, a palliative care team offers experts in pain management. Treatment is focused on relieving distressing symptoms. Doctors and nurses are especially trained in the latest and most effective pain treatments including medicines, surgery, psychological approaches and complementary therapies designed to alleviate any pain or discomfort.

Total family care
Members are encouraged to become involved in the process, to ask questions, participate in care giving, and share in decision making. The spiritual member of your palliative care team can provide comfort not only to the patient, but also to the family members who may be having a hard time coping with the situation.

Attention to empathy, understanding, and communication
These are key to excellent palliative care. Often people with cancer have a hard time talking with their doctors about many aspects of their treatment. They may feel anxious and frightened, or unfamiliar with what is going on in their body and unable to verbalize it. Palliative caregivers are trained to deal with each worry in a systematic and concrete way, helping the cancer patient keep informed of the choices and treatments available to them.

Palliative care is individualized care
Cancer patients have different responses to pain and treatments as well as individual likes and dislikes. With a palliative care team, a personís individual needs as well as the diagnosis and stage of disease are factored into the treatment plan.

Review pain management options
Suffering from pain is not a normal part of treatment. With the multitude of options available, ranging from medication to surgery to complementary treatments such as biofeedback and acupuncture, there is little need to suffer from pain. However you do need to be proactive and become as knowledgeable as possible about your symptoms and what treatments are available, then be able to articulate them so you can get the help you need. For a full discussion on pain management, see step fiveís Pain Management Ladder