What is Palliative care? | Who Should receive Palliative Care? | How Palliative Care Can Help You?

Palliative Care is offered to patients who are diagnosed with a life-limiting disease and focuses on a patient's quality of life, rather curing the disease. A patient may still be actively treating his or her disease and not require hospice care; however, a person with a life-limiting disease faces difficult physical, emotional and perhaps spiritual challenges. Palliative care addresses these by

• providing a team approach to caring for the patient, including a doctor and a nurse practitioner who specialize in palliative care medicine, a medical social worker and a member of the chaplaincy program.
• coordinating between the patient, the palliative care team and the patient's doctor to provide comfort for physical symptoms.
• providing support for the social, spiritual and emotional challenges that patients and families with life-limiting diseases experience.
• helping patients to live as full and dignified life as possible.

Any patient struggling from physical symptoms or psychological issues that accompany life-limiting conditions, such as:

The palliative care team at SHS can help patients and their families by:

• Participating in discussions with the patient and his or her family to help everyone understand the patient's disease or condition.
• Assisting the patient's primary care doctor with symptom management, helping to manage pain and enhance the patient's comfort.
• Providing emotional support.
• Assisting with difficult decisions about the patient's life-limiting disease.
• Coordinating hospital and community services that are available to help the patient and his or her family.
• Exploring spiritual issues with the goal of obtaining peace .