What is palliative care?
Written by:Palliative care is all those treatments and care focused on relieving suffering patients with serious illnesses. These treat the side effects or symptoms of a disease or its treatment. Symptoms include physical as well as emotional. You can be performed in a hospital admission or at home thanks to a medical service at home .
Diseases requiring palliative care
- Cancer
- Organ failure in advanced or terminal phase: respiratory failure (COPD), heart failure (CHF), liver failure or renal failure
- neurodegenerative disease: dementia, stroke, multiple sclerosis or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Palliative care at home
Palliative home care consist of an integral, active and individualized patient care in the final stages of the disease and their families, comprising all areas or spheres of the person: physical, emotional, social and spiritual, with the main objectives alleviate suffering and promote comfort and quality of life to the end.
- Pain Control: preferential attention to pain, we specialize in the management of analgesics for different routes of administration including opiate drugs.
- Treatment of other physical symptoms: whether they are due to the disease and the side effects of the therapies, we take care to treat and relieve symptoms that affect the quality of life of patients.
- Psychosocial Support: we treat emotional aspects, understanding the patient and their environment as a unit to treat. Psychological support and fluid communication are vital in the process of support for patient and family.
- Active listening and support in other aspects as solving practical or logistical issues, decision making, spiritual sphere ...
- personalized advice as to socio-health resources, legal documents (DVA) ...
When needed palliative care?
There are global criteria that define when a disease is at an advanced stage and therefore need palliative care:
- incurable advanced disease
- Unresponsive to treatment
- Presence of numerous problems or severe symptoms
- emotional impact on the patient and family by the presence of an upcoming death
- Limited life prognosis, below 6 months.
