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It is like a full team support system for someone that is going through a serious illness . It helps with pain management and therapy for patient to deal with the illness and pain and emotions of it all . It usually is a team of a Dr. - a nurse - social worker and spiritual care worker .
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funkygrandma59 Oct 5, 2024
Trixpie, I believe you're describing hospice care and not palliative care, as palliative care is nothing more than a nurse coming once a month to check on the person under their care and that is it.
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Overview from Mayo Clinic

Palliative care is specialized medical care that focuses on providing relief from pain and other symptoms of a serious illness. It also can help you cope with side effects from medical treatments. The availability of palliative care does not depend on whether your condition can be cured.

Palliative care teams aim to provide comfort and improve quality of life for people and their families. This form of care is offered alongside other treatments a person may be receiving.

Palliative care is provided by a team of health care providers, including doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains and other trained specialists. The team works with you, your family and your other providers to add an extra layer of support and relief that complements your ongoing care.

Why it's done
Palliative care may be offered to people of any age who have a serious or life-threatening illness. It can help adults and children living with illnesses such as:
Cancer.
Blood and bone marrow disorders requiring stem cell transplant.
Heart disease.
Cystic fibrosis.
Dementia.
End-stage liver disease.
Kidney failure.
Lung disease.
Parkinson's disease.
Stroke and other serious illnesses.
Symptoms that may be improved by palliative care include:
Pain.
Nausea or vomiting.
Anxiety or nervousness.
Depression or sadness.
Constipation.
Difficulty breathing.
Loss of appetite.
Fatigue.
Trouble sleeping

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My palliative care team consists of a doctor and a social worker who work as a team to offer me relief options from my cancer symptoms and treatment side effects.
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Moondancer Oct 5, 2024
Thank you for your very complete answer. Palliative care can be different for folks depending on the services offered by the provider.
In my area there is only one Palliative Care doctor and a nurse practitioner available. At this time they do not have other supportive services but were able to refer to other providers for zoom consults.

Both and my partner (he died in February) and I used palliative care services and found it a great help. Neither of us have terminal illness, just a whole bunch of other conditions and diseases. Our PC doc suggested to me that it would be a good idea for him to review my advance directive for healthcare to make sure it was in good order and medically acceptable. He spent 2 hours with me reviewing it and made some good suggestions.
For anyone dealing with a lot of medical conditions I would recommend investigating palliative care in your area to see what is available.
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My friend is a palliative care doctor and what she does is fully evaluate the patient and she looks at all the medicine they are on.

Palliative care streamlines the comfort care to one doctor so that you don’t have 5 docs all treating and prescribing for different issues and where not one of them sees how their treatment and meds affect the person as a whole.

Many times, she withdraws redundant meds and the meds that were prescribed to counteract the side effects from other meds. So she basically sort of starts over with the medicine plan.

This alone nearly always gives the patient a much better quality of life.

Pallative care is really amazing with what it can do for a person.
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There is wonderful information online.
Type the exact question into a "google" or other search engine searchline and you will have just a ton of informations on palliative care.
Also discuss with your own doctor whether palliative care is a good option now for you or your loved one.
Good luck.
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It's basically the step before going under full hospice care. A nurse will come out once a month to check on the person under their care and advise whoever is caring for them what they are observing. And that is it. Nothing more, nothing less.
To me personally it's a waste of time for all involved.
I would just wait until someone qualifies for hospice care as that does offer a little more help.
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Southernwaver Oct 5, 2024
I’m sorry that was your experience and reference point because that is not at all what palliative care is.
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Once again, I do recommend you go to your favorite search engine. It is too complicated to type out all that Palliative Care is, but explanations online are EXCELLENT and there's lots of them.
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I have shared here before how palliative care significantly improved the life of my husband and I during his last six months. I was his only caregiver and having a medical partner(nurse practitioner) provided tremendous stress relief for me. She would come as often as I requested, which was usually every 3 to 4 weeks, sometimes more. We both got an hour plus of individualized attention, something we would not have received in a doctor’s office. For the first time in many years, my husband had times where his pain was fully controlled, and some other symptoms were better managed,

When he started to seriously decline, our NP contacted the medical director of hospice and was able to get him admitted for home services while continuing hemodialysis. He only went twice, but it gave him the time he needed to make the decision himself to stop dialysis. We had several good days together and he had a peaceful death at home, something both the NP and I think would not have happened otherwise.

My only complaint was that there wasn’t someone available 24/7 to answer questions because of course everything happens at night and on the weekends.
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