The key to effective palliative care is to provide a safe way for the individual to address their physical and psychological distress, that is to say their total suffering, a concept first thought up by Dame Cicely Saunders, and now widely used, for instance by authors like Twycross or Woodruff. Dealing with total suffering involves a broad range of concerns, starting with treating physical symptoms such as pain, nausea and breathlessness. The palliative care teams have become very skillful in prescribing drugs for physical symptoms, and have been instrumental in showing how drugs such as morphine can be used safely while maintaining a patient's full faculties and function. However, when a patient exhibits a physiological symptom, there are often psychological, social, or spiritual symptoms as well. The interdisciplinary team, which often includes a social worker or a counselor and a chaplain, can play a role in helping the patient and family cope globally with these symptoms, rather than depending on the medical/pharmacological interventions alone. Usually, a palliative care patient's concerns are pain, fears about the future, loss of independence, worries about their family, and feeling like a burden. While some patients will want to discuss psychological or spiritual concerns and some will not, it is fundamentally important to assess each individual and their partners and families need for this type of support. Denying an individual and their support system an opportunity to explore psychological or spiritual concerns is just as harmful as forcing them to deal with issues they either don't have or choose not to deal with.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Practice
In the United States hospice and palliative care represent two different aspects of care with similar philosophy, but with different payment systems and location of services. Palliative care services are most often provided in acute care hospitals organized around an interdisciplinary consultation service with or without an acute inpatient palliative care ward. Palliative care may also be provided in the dying person's home as a "bridge" program between traditional US home care services and hospice care or provided in long-term care facilities. In contrast over 80% of hospice care in the US is provided in a patient's home with the remainder provided to patients residing in long-term care facilities or in free standing hospice residential facilities. In the UK hospice is seen as one part of the specialty of palliative care and no differentiation is made between 'hospice' and 'palliative care'.
In most countries hospice and palliative care is provided by an interdisciplinary team consisting of physicians, registered nurses, nursing assistants, social workers, hospice chaplains, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, complementary therapists, volunteers, and, most important, the family. The team's focus is to optimize the patient's comfort. Additional members of the team are likely to include certified nursing assistants or home health care aides, volunteers from the community (largely untrained but some being skilled medical personnel), and housekeepers.
Concept
The term "palliative care" may be used generally to refer to any care that alleviates symptoms, whether or not there is hope of a cure by other means; thus, a recent WHO statement calls palliative care "an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness." Palliative treatments may also be used to alleviate the side effects of curative treatments, such as relieving the nausea associated with chemotherapy.
The term "palliative care" is increasingly used with regard to diseases other than cancer such as chronic, progressive pulmonary disorders, renal disease, chronic heart failure, and progressive neurological conditions. In addition, the rapidly growing field of pediatric palliative care has clearly shown the need for services geared specifically for children with serious illness.
Although the concept of palliative care is not new, most physicians have traditionally concentrated on trying to cure patients. Treatments for the alleviation of symptoms were viewed as hazardous and seen as inviting addiction and other unwanted side effects.
The focus on a patient's quality of life has increased greatly during the past twenty years. In the United States today, 55% of hospitals with more than 100 beds offer a palliative-care program, and nearly one-fifth of community hospitals have palliative-care programs. A relatively recent development is the concept of a dedicated health care team that is entirely geared toward palliative treatment: a palliative-care team.
History
Palliative care began in the hospice movement and is now widely used outside of traditional hospice care. Hospices were originally places of rest for travelers in the 4th century. In the 19th century a religious order established hospices for the dying in Ireland and London. The modern hospice is a relatively recent concept that originated and gained momentum in the United Kingdom after the founding of St. Christopher's Hospice in 1967. It was founded by Dame Cicely Saunders, widely regarded as the founder of the modern hospice movement.
The hospice movement has grown dramatically in recent years. In the UK in 2005 there were just under 1700 hospice services consisting of 220 inpatient units for adults with 3156 beds, 33 inpatient units for children with 255 beds, 358 home care services, 104 hospice at home services, 263 day care services, and 293 hospital teams. These services together helped over 250,000 patients in 2003 & 2004. Funding varies from 100% funding by the National Health Service to almost 100% funding by charities, but the service is always free to patients.
Hospice in the United States has grown from a volunteer-led movement to improve care for people dying alone, isolated, or in hospitals, to a significant part of the health care system. In 2005 more than 1.2 million individuals and their families received hospice care. Hospice is the only Medicare benefit that includes pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, twenty-four hour/seven day a week access to care and support for loved ones following a death. Most hospice care is delivered at home. Hospice care is also available to people in home-like hospice residences, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, veterans' facilities, hospitals, and prisons.
The first United States hospital-based palliative care programs began in the late 1980s at a handful of institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic and Medical College of Wisconsin. Since then there has been a dramatic increase in hospital-based palliative care programs, now numbering more than 1200. Over 55% of U.S. hospitals over 100 beds have a program. Hospital palliative care programs today care for non-terminal patients as well as hospice patients. Palliative care programs in hospitals can be expensive to operate - palliative care can require substantial time and large teams to deliver, and patients may not have adequate insurance or savings to cover the cost. Strategies for funding palliative care programs, therefore, typically focus on cutting hospital costs over generating revenue.
Palliative care
Palliative (from Latin palliare, to cloak) is any form of medical care or treatment that concentrates on reducing the severity of disease symptoms, rather than striving to halt, delay, or reverse progression of the disease itself or provide a cure. The goal is to prevent and relieve suffering and to improve quality of life for people facing serious, complex illness. Non-hospice palliative care is not dependent on prognosis and is offered in conjunction with curative and all other appropriate forms of medical treatment. It should not be confused with hospice care which delivers palliative care to those at the end of life. In the UK, this distinction is not operative; hospices and non-hospice-based palliative care teams both provide care to those with life limiting illness at any stage of their disease.