By Toni Kesler
Palliative Care Specialist,
Community Care

Helping people as they enter the last phase of life is a team effort. Community Care’s Palliative Care Team works closely with our interdisciplinary teams to help our PACE and Partnership participants in their end of life journey. We help our participants cope with the emotional, spiritual and physical challenges that they face.

Palliative care is an approach that improves the quality of life of our PACE and Partnership participants and their families facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification, assessment and treatment of pain and other physical, emotional and spiritual symptoms. It is strongly associated with hospice care but takes a broader approach of services to the terminally ill. Hospice care is given in the last six months of life, but palliative care can be provided any time in the life of a person dealing with a serious illness.

Community Care’s Palliative Care Team includes a palliative care specialist with a nurse practitioner background, a physician and two chaplains who are available as a resource to the interdisciplinary teams that manage our participants’ care. We serve both as consultants to the interdisciplinary team and actually provide palliative care to program participants. It often takes a person’s interdisciplinary team, the Palliative Care Team and the family working together to make it possible for a person to stay at home through the end of his or her life.

Beyond physical care, we help program participants with spiritual and emotional pain. We begin by asking questions:

• What do you know about your illness?
• Knowing what you know, how do you want to live the rest of your life?
• What are the things you really want in your life?
• How can we help with these things?
• What is it that you need to do?

For some, it’s the need to reconnect spiritually. For others, there are broken relationships they want to mend. Once I worked with a delightful lady who was estranged from her family and lived in a high rise for the elderly. She was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. It was very important to her to be able to die in her own apartment with her beloved cat at her side. With the help of close friends in her building, the participant’s team and the Palliative Care Team she was able to achieve this goal.