Video:What Is Palliative Care?

Transcript:What Is Palliative Care?

Hi, my name is Dr. Nathan Goldstein. I'm from the department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at The Mount Sinai School of Medicine and I'm here for about.com to talk about palliative care.

What Is Palliative Care?

Palliative care is specialized medical care, interdisciplinary care that is aimed to relieve suffering and improve the quality of life for patients with serious illness and their families. It is not the same thing as end of life care and it is given simultaneously with all other life-sustaining treatments.

We do three things. We treat pain and other symptoms, we make sure that patients and families understand kind of what's going on with their medical condition. And figure out what their goals are and tailor treatments to those goals.

Who Administers Palliative Care?

Palliative care works in conjunction with all the other members of the medical teams. If a patient has known their doctors for years or just a month or two, we come in and work with them. So, we're not there to take over, we're not there to force patients and families to give up the providers that they know. We work with the patient and the family and the provider. So, we're a team that is added to the team that is already taking care of the patient. Not instead of.

Who Receives Palliative Care?

Patients who receive palliative care include those with heart disease, lung disease, kidney disease, or renal disease, patients with cancer, patients with dementia. So, it's a whole range of diagnosis in palliative care.

Palliative care is there for as long as the patient and the family need it. I've had actual cases where the patient's fine and we continue to work with the family. We have many patients that we follow for years and we even continue to work with the family after the patient dies.

We treat lots of different symptoms other than pain in palliative care. We treat shortness of breath, anxiety, fatigue depression, trouble sleeping. We're particularly specialists in pain control but we treat a wide range of symptoms that any patient with serious illness might have. And then the third things we do is coordinate care for when patients are ready to leave the hospital. We make sure that they have the package of services, the care that they need when they are going to leave the hospital.

Where is Palliative Care Administered?

The majority of palliative care in this country is delivered in the hospital but palliative care can also be seen in the outpatient, in the clinic, in the doctor's office so to speak. Palliative care can also be in the Nursing Homes and there are some places that will also do Palliative care at home, that will send clinicians to the house to do palliative care home visits.

Palliative care is mostly for patients with complex illness, and that's really the only diagnostic criteria. The only thing that people need, is some sort of illness with which they need help.

Palliative care is all about improving quality of life for patients. So, when we go into the patient, whether it's myself, my nurse, my social worker, my chaplain, my massage therapist, my yoga therapist -- we're all in there to figure out what the patient needs and how we can help them.

So palliative care is really care in addition to what the nurse or general practitioner can deliver.

Thanks for watching. And to learn more, visit us on the web at About.com.