What is Palliative Care
- Palliative Care is specialized care for people with serious illness and is provided by a doctor, nurse, social worker, and chaplain, and in coordination with your primary care physician
- The focus of Palliative Care is to promote quality of life for patients, and their families, who are living with a chronic progressive illness.
- Services are provided at the same time as all other medical treatments
- The goal of Palliative Care is to address and resolve the discomfort, symptoms and stress of serious illness. The intent is to help you and your family live as well as possible
How does it work?
Living with a serious illness is not easy. There are difficult topics to discuss, treatment options to consider and decisions to make.
To provide you with the best service possible, we want to know:
- how much you want to know about your illness
- how your treatment is going
- what worries you the most
We believe that you can live with your illness better:
- if you or your family know more about it
- if you have tools to manage changes that may take place
- if you and your loved ones receive adequate support
We will work with you and your primary care physician to develop a care plan that reflects your values and goals – a plan to which your other providers in Kaiser Permanente will have access.
What can I expect from Palliative Care?
We will be interested in knowing:
- who you are
- how things are going for you
- what your values and goals are for the future
We will ask about your medical condition:
- your diagnosis
- treatments you are receiving
- your understanding of what your options are as your disease progresses
We want to hear about your quality of life:
- how well you are feeling
- how well you are managing day to day
- how well those around you are coping with your illness
We will work with you to develop a plan of care to ensure that:
- your symptoms are managed
- your wishes for care are documented
- you have information about resources available to meet your changing needs
