End Of Life Care Essay

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Palliative Care: What Is End of Life Care

If the title of this article threw you for a loop – good. If it didn't, then you may be one of the millions of Americans who confuse palliative care and hospice care. While that is not always a terrible thing, there are times when the confusion could lead to problems for your senior loved one.

Palliative care is defined by GetPalliativeCare.org as "specialized medical care for people with serious illnesses...focused on providing patients with relief from the symptoms, pain, and stress of a serious illness—whatever the diagnosis. The goal is to improve the quality of life for both the patient and the family." Palliative care can be utilized at any stage of an illness, injury, or disease and can be utilized in conjunction with …show more content…

In fact, next to pain management, the most important part of palliative care is increased communication between the patient, the family, and the health care team.

Hospice, or end of life care, is defined by the National Institute of Aging as "the support and medical care provided to an individual during the time leading up to their death". The care can extend up to six months prior to the time of expected death, but can go even longer if the senior started care and simply held on longer than expected. Hospice care focuses on maximizing the quality of a person's end of life experience after curative and restorative treatments have ceased.

The confusion arises because a large component of hospice care includes palliative care services and personnel. Sadly, because of the confusion, many seniors and their families have historically avoided palliative care treatments because they mistakenly believed that starting palliative care would result in the stopping or canceling of curative

Becoming a Physical Therapist Assistant
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Palliative care is medical or comfort care that reduces the severity of a disease or slows its progress, but does not provide a cure (Dreeben, 2007). Different people have different needs when life is ending. Working with the incurable may sound depressing but death is a certainty and what we do each day for these patients as physical therapist assistants, matters. Providing care effectively and appropriately has a huge impact on the patient, therefore acquiring the ability to comfort and care for a patient at such a critical stage in life, is an amazin...
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1356 Words | 3 Pages
Gawande’s book is very pertinent to the present day and has by many accounts sparked a national discussion on end-of-life care and how we treat our elderly. With elderly people accounting for a greater proportion of the American populace and as people start living even longer than they do now, end-of-life care will become and remain a major issue faced by doctors, patients, their families, and the healthcare system. Additionally, with our greater focus on improving patient outcomes while getting the most value for our healthcare dollars, end-of-life care is a major area that healthcare systems and hospitals will focus on, as it accounts for a large portion of their budget. As a response to the need to take care of our aging population, hospice care and palliative medicine are some of the newer specialties in the medical field that have been increasing in popularity and more research needs to be focused in these areas to better understand how to improve patient outcomes.
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End Of Life Care Essay
768 Words | 2 Pages
Hospice focuses on end of life care. When patients are facing terminal illness and have an expected life sentence of days to six months or less of life. Care can take place in different milieu including at home, hospice care center, hospital, and skilled nursing facility. Hospice provides patients and family the tool and resources of how to come to the acceptance of death. The goal of care is to help people who are dying have peace, comfort, and dignity. A team of health care providers and volunteers are responsible for providing care. A primary care doctor and a hospice doctor or medical director will patients care. The patient is allowed to decide who their primary doctor will be while receiving hospice care. It may be a primary care physician or a hospice physician. Nurses provide care at home by vising patient at home or in a hospital setting facility. Nurses are responsible for coordination of the hospice care team. Home health aides provide support for daily and routine care ( dressing, bathing, eating and etc). Spiritual counselors, Chaplains, priests, lay ministers or other spiritual counselors can provide spiritual care and guidance for the entire family. Social workers provide counseling and support. They can also provide referrals to other support systems. Pharmacists provide medication oversight and suggestions regarding the most effective
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Palliative care - treatment that helps to comfort patients, while slowing the progress of a disease.
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Hospice Care refers to the focus on quality of care and life rather than treatment and curative options for someone and their disease. This type of care includes not only the patient, but also their family and physician. Dame Cicely Saunders states, “You matter because of who you are. You matter to the last moment of your life, and we will do all we can, not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die.” With this quote, Saunders reflects what Hospice believes in and their commitment, or duty, for the patient. Patients who are terminally ill can be considered as patients with cancer, diabetes, and many more diseases. Very few cancer patients have a type of cancer that has a known cure, and unlike those patients many other cancer patients possess a type of cancer that is curable today. Terminally ill patients have to choose between continuing treatment or being provided with Hospice Care. Both hope and Hospice means that the patient can have both the benefit from treatments, which give them hope that the disease could be cured or at least reduce the symptoms, and Hospice Care, which provides the patients with relieve of pain and
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The end-of-life nurse’s primary objective is to provide comfort and compassion to patients and their families during an extremely difficult time. They must satisfy all “physical, psychological, social, cultural and spiritual needs” of the patient and their family. (Wu & Volker, 2012) The nurse involves their patient in care planning, as well as educating them about the options available. They must follow the wishes of the patient and their family, as provided in the patient’s advance directive if there is one available. It is i...
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Euthanasia is one of the most complicated issues in the medical field due to the debate of whether or not it is morally right. Today, the lives of many patients can be saved with the latest discoveries in medicine and technology. But we are still unable to find cures to all illnesses, and patients have to go through extremely painful treatments only to live a little bit longer. These patients struggle with physical and psychological pain. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. discusses the topic of just and unjust laws in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” which brings into question whether it is just to kill a patient who is suffering or unjust to take that person’s life even if that person is suffering. In my opinion people should have the right, with certain restrictions, to end their lives in the way they see fit if they are suffering from endless pain.
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585 Words | 2 Pages
The aim of a hospice is to improve the quality of life of the dying
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right to die
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Palliative care is essentially end of life care. It specializes in keeping the patient as comfortable
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The care of patients at the end of their live should be as humane and respectful to help them cope with the accompanying prognosis of the end of their lives. The reality of this situation is that all too often, the care a patient receives at the end of their life is quite different and generally not performed well. The healthcare system of the United States does not perform well within the scope of providing the patient with by all means a distress and pain free palliative or hospice care plan. To often patients do not have a specific plan implemented on how they wish to have their end of life care carried out for them. End of life decisions are frequently left to the decision of family member's or physicians who may not know what the patient needs are beforehand or is not acting in the patient's best wishes. This places the unenviable task of choosing care for the patient instead of the patient having a carefully written out plan on how to carry out their final days. A strategy that can improve the rate of care that patients receive and improve the healthcare system in general would be to have the patient create a end of life care plan with their primary care physician one to two years prior to when the physician feels that the patient is near the end of their life. This would put the decision making power on the patient and it would improve the quality of care the patient receives when they are at the end of their life. By developing a specific care plan, the patient would be in control of their wishes on how they would like their care to be handled when the time of death nears. We can identify strengths and weakness with this strategy and implement changes to the strategy to improve the overall system of care with...
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840 Words | 2 Pages
Death is a universal truth. Hospice reduces the suffering associated with death. Hospice is considered the philosophy and model for quality, compassionate care to terminally ill patients. Patients accepted into a hospice program usually have a prognosis of less than six months to live (Potter, Perry, Stockert & Hall, 2017, p. 761). Hospice provides skilled medical care, pain management, emotional, and spiritual support tailored to the patient’s needs and wishes. The goal of hospice is to focus on the quality of life during the end of life. It gives patients a sense of dignity, provides patients and families with support, and it is cost effective. Today, seven out of ten Americans die from chronic disease. By 2020, the number of people living with a chronic illness will increase to 157 million (Hogan 2012). As the elderly population in the U.S. continues to increase, the importance of hospice will only continue to grow.
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Palliative care involves the holistic care to maintain and improve the quality of life of the patient and family during hospitalisation until the terminal stage. Palliation of care refers to the multidisciplinary approach of providing comfort and support for the terminally ill patient and family, thus has an important role in maintaining and improving the quality of life of the whole family. Chronic illness such as cancer gives a physiologic and emotional burden for the patient and family. Education and counselling of the possible options as well as treatments for pain and other symptoms that could help alleviate anxiety, suffering and discomfort. Palliative care provides assistance for the family as a channel for communication between the
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Palliative care “focuses more broadly on improving life and providing comfort to people of all ages with serious, chronic, and life-threatening illnesses” (http://www.WebMD.com). Palliative care is not the same as hospice, since it is not only for the dying. According ...
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The subject of death and dying can cause many controversies for health care providers. Not only can it cause legal issues for them, but it also brings about many ethical issues as well. Nearly every health care professional has experienced a situation dealing with death or dying. This tends to be a tough topic for many people, so health care professionals should take caution when handling these matters. Healthcare professionals not only deal with patient issues but also those of the family. Some of the controversies of death and dying many include; stages of death and dying, quality of life issues, use of medications and advanced directives.
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Euthanasia is ending the life of a person deliberately to relieve their pain. It usually happens when a person is terminally ill or is suffering from a lot of pain and there is no other option to relieve the pain.
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End Of Life Care Essay

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