Understanding Palliative Care: Benefits, Services, and Eligibility
Living with a serious, life-limiting illness is a challenge for not just the individual but for the community surrounding them. It can be tough to balance care for your loved one and a job or social and family obligations. If you or a loved one is struggling to manage an illness, it might be time to consider palliative care.
At Solterra Senior Living, we can help you see the benefits of palliative care. We are proud to offer comprehensive palliative care services, giving our residents the treatment they need to regain control of their lives. Our compassionate team is dedicated to enhancing comfort, managing symptoms, and improving quality of life. Here is a brief overview of what you should know when considering a palliative care plan.
What Is Palliative Care?
Palliative care is often associated with hospice care, which is a reasonable connection to make. Both palliative and hospice care are concerned with the patient’s quality of life, although the care they each provide has some notable differences. While hospice care is mainly focused on easing the pain and stress of patients who are nearing the end of their lives, palliative care is aimed at anyone who is living with a severe illness that is impacting their everyday life.
Patients in palliative care continue to receive treatments for their illness. In hospice, treatment is no longer considered effective or would cause too much of a burden on the patient. Palliative care also has several benefits for the patient’s family, providing them with services to help improve their quality of life.
The Benefits
Palliative care doesn’t just tackle individual aspects of an illness; it seeks instead to address the problems as a whole and create a holistic approach. By looking at the illness comprehensively, palliative care offers several additional benefits you might not otherwise gain.
Managing Symptoms
Palliative care can help address symptoms that negatively impact a patient’s quality of life. Things like pain, nausea, fatigue, shortness of breath, loss of appetite, and difficulty sleeping can severely affect the ability a person has to live their life. Working with a palliative care team, you can create a treatment plan to help manage symptoms and side effects and enjoy as much of life as possible.
Reducing Stress
The difficulties of managing a serious illness go beyond the illness itself. Between figuring out care options, insurance plans, living situations, and a host of other choices, both patients and their families can quickly get overwhelmed. One of the most significant benefits of palliative care is taking all those disparate problems and turning them into manageable decisions. With a dedicated team of doctors, nurses, and social workers, you’ll have the support you need to navigate care without undue stress and anxiety.
Aligning Care with Goals
When in palliative care, the patient is the person in charge. They get to make decisions about how they want their illness managed and set their ultimate goals. This effective system gets your entire care team on the same page, making sure any medical professionals you interact with understand where you are and where you’d like to go.
One of the most challenging parts of managing a severe illness can be the lack of control a patient feels. In palliative care, they can regain that control and improve their quality of life.
The Services
Anyone managing a serious illness will have specific needs, so no one-size-fits-all treatment will benefit everyone. Instead, several palliative care services are available to help patients construct the ideal treatment plan and maximize their quality of life.
Coordinating Your Medical Team
Living with a serious illness is difficult enough without logistical challenges. A palliative care team can provide that additional level of support, managing the communication between any doctors involved with treatment and ensuring everyone is on the same page.
As you navigate treatment, your team will help ensure you get everything you need precisely when you need it. They can also help coordinate moving from one state of care to another, like from hospital to home care.
Navigating Difficult Decisions
Pursuing treatment can become a series of difficult decisions. One of the benefits of palliative care is having a dedicated team there by your side, helping you weigh all your options and determine which makes the most sense for you.
A palliative care team listens to and respects patients’ wishes as part of its dedication to improving a patient’s quality of life. With an informed support system, you’ll be able to make choices that align with your values.
Providing Emotional Support
Stress, anxiety, and depression are all too common when managing a serious illness, not only in the patient but in their loved ones as well. Palliative care gives you and everyone around you the emotional support needed to handle the situation and continue to live your daily life.
As we mentioned previously, the goal is to improve the overall quality of life for the patient and their loved ones. If the care was only concerned with physical symptoms and treatments, it wouldn’t be addressing the whole of the problem. The benefits of palliative care extend beyond the physical symptoms to the emotional and mental ones as well, providing care for the whole patient and those who love them.
Who Is Eligible?
Palliative care is an option for anyone managing serious illness, not just people at the end of their lives. You can be eligible to enter palliative care at any point in your illness; the decision is yours to make whether or not you need it.
If you think it’s time to have a conversation about palliative care, the team here at Solterra Senior Living is ready to answer any questions you might have. So whether you or a loved one might need care soon or you want to plan for the future, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We are here to help you determine the support level you need!