Palliative Care

Palliative Care FAQs

What is Palliative Care?

Palliative care is comfort care. There are two current mainstream avenues in offering palliative care. First, hospice care offers palliative care. When there is no cure and comfort is sought, hospice care provides palliative care when prognosis is months. Second, typically offered in palliative care units and often times in connection with hospital services, palliative care is offered to chronically ill individuals where there may or may not be a cure, but prognosis can be years.

Hospice of the Ozarks offers palliative care through hospice services when care is measured in months, not years. Even though we do not provide palliative care for chronically ill individuals, as experts in providing palliative care to hospice patients, we do offer consultation in conjunction with the patient’s physician for ideas to help bring comfort care to individuals seeking palliative care.

Palliative care involves caring for the whole person, not just the illness. This means attending to:

• Your physical needs
• Easing symptoms of your illness: pain, nausea, hygiene needs, dry mouth, pressure ulcers, constipation, and other discomforts
• Care for other conditions that cause discomfort
• Your emotional and spiritual well-being through the support of social workers and chaplains
• Bereavement counseling: You may be mourning the loss of a job, the bread winner's ability to work, your own inabilities to do the things you used to do
• Social workers: social workers can help with the paper work, getting things in order, working with other agencies to help work through the webs of bureaucracy
• Emotional support from all members of the team
• Treatment for depression and anxiety
• Spiritual psychosocial support

Palliative care can include care for loved ones that might benefit from emotional support as well.

As your condition changes, you may choose to place more focus on comfort care. You may also decide to change or scale back medical treatment aimed at a cure.

Pain control is an important part of palliative care. You have a right to good pain control! We want you to feel comfortable talking with the hospice team and your attending physician and his/her staff.

We are dedicated to finding the most effective ways to manage your pain and promote independence and healthy living, with the least side effects.

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