Palliative Care

Palliative care focuses on enhancing the quality of life for the client and supporting the family. This is achieved through preventing and relieving suffering by means of early identification, assessment, intervention and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual; and through end of life care and bereavement support.

Palliative care:

• provides relief from pain and other distressing symptoms;
• affirms life and regards dying as a normal process;
• intends neither to hasten or postpone death;
• integrates the psychological and spiritual aspects of client care;
• offers a support system to help clients live as actively as possible until death;
• offers a support system to help the family cope during the client’s illness and in their bereavement;
• uses a team approach to address the needs of clients and their families, including bereavement counselling;
• aims to enhance quality of life, and may also positively influence the course of illness; and
• is applicable early in the course of illness, in conjunction with other therapies that are intended to prolong life, such as chemotherapy or radiation therapy, and includes those investigations needed to better understand and manage distressing clinical complications.
• Palliative care is provided to people of all ages whose illness is not responsive to curative treatment, or who have chosen not to pursue active, curative treatment. Traditionally associated with cancer care it is now recognised that palliative care should be available on the basis of unmet need, not diagnosis. Hence the palliative approach to care is now increasingly being offered to individuals with non-malignant illnesses including:
  • neurological conditions;
  • end stage renal, cardiac or respiratory failure;
  • chronic cardiac and respiratory conditions;
  • chronic and severe peripheral vascular disease; and
  • congenital degenerative disorders.

Palliative care is provided not only to the person with the life-limiting illness but to their cares and family as needed – together comprising the unit of care. Effective palliative care provides a direct benefit to the client as well as being an important preventive health intervention for the family.

In contrast to some commonly held myths Palliative Care is not:
“End-of-life care” - palliative care includes but is not limited to caring for people at the end of life.
“Doing nothing” - even when the underlying condition can not be cured, clinical intervention to control and manage symptoms may improve a person’s quality of life. Palliative care is a very active approach to symptom management and client support.
“Commenced only when active treatment aimed at disease control stops” - elements of palliative care interventions and active treatment can be combined during the course of the life-limiting illness.