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Palliative Care

Palliative Care Provides Expert Care to Patients Living with a Serious Illness

Our palliative care team strives to make patients treating a serious illness as comfortable as possible. While a primary care provider treats the disease, we manage the side-effects of the treatments and provide symptom relief. In other words: we help enhance a patient’s quality of life.

We Increase Your Comfort

Palliative care is specialized medical care for people with a serious illness, helping a family member or loved one enjoy a better quality of life. Our palliative care providers focus on symptom management related to a patient’s illness or side effects from treatment options and help people make decisions about their healthcare options. This type of support is appropriate for many illnesses including cancer, advanced heart or lung disease such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and neurological conditions such as ALS, MS, Parkinson’s, and dementia, among others.

Partners In Care offers an interdisciplinary team of palliative care specialists including doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses, chaplains, and social workers. Palliative care specialists are specifically trained to expertly treat the many symptoms related to an advanced illness. Conditions may include pain, fatigue, nausea, shortness of breath, constipation, loss of appetite, or difficulty sleeping – as well as the spiritual or emotional stress that can be associated with a life-limiting illness.

Palliative care is not only for terminally ill patients. It’s a medical specialty that should be offered alongside curative or disease-modifying treatments when appropriate and should start soon after the diagnosis of any serious illness.

“Thank you to all the doctors, nurses, and staff involved in evaluating and caring for my wife. After the pandemic began, they even provided computer technology to continue monitoring her care. Your professionalism, quality of care, communication, expertise, and much more helped us through this journey. We could not have done it without Partners In Care!”
- Loved one

Palliative Care Benefits

  • The palliative care team supplements a patient’s doctors, helping patients and their families cope with a life threatening illness. We let specialized doctors focus on treatment, while we focus on comfort care.
  • We take into account a family’s values and preferences, providing information and emotional support to inform difficult decisions and ensuring they receive the best care possible.
  • We offer guidance and supportive care in navigating the healthcare system and a patient’s individual healthcare needs.
  • We let patients live their lives by addressing the physical symptoms of a chronic illness or the side-effects of its treatment with palliative medicine.

“As palliative care providers, we sit down with you and whomever is important to you to learn what you care about most in life. This allows us to support you in aligning treatment goals with your illness to ensure you are getting the best care possible, based on who you are and what you most value. Meeting soon after your diagnosis of a serious illness allows us to understand you better, provide deeper support, and be sure your quality of life can be the best possible.”
– Dr. Jennifer Blechman, Partners In Care Palliative Care Medical Director

Find Additional Information & Resources here.

Palliative Care FAQs

Palliative Care is a newer program, and we know you may have many questions about the support you will receive and how it differs from other types of care Partners In Care provides.
Why is palliative care important?

Being diagnosed with a serious illness can be overwhelming for both patients and families. We know that involving a palliative care team with a patient’s other medical providers not only improves quality of life, but often helps people live longer with improved quality. Working with a palliative care team makes coping with illness easier for both the patient and their family.

Who should receive palliative care?
Anyone who has been diagnosed with a serious illness should have palliative care. Ideally it should be introduced soon after the diagnosis of an advanced illness, and in conjunction with other treatments.
How does palliative care differ from hospice?

Hospice is a subset of palliative care, with similar goals of improved quality of life and helping to support the patient’s decisions about their end-of-life care in line with their spiritual needs, values, and preferences. However, hospice care for a terminal illness has restrictions that don’t exist with palliative care services. Hospice is intended for support during a patient’s last six months of life and there are some restrictions on treatments; whereas palliative care should be provided for people of all ages and early in the disease course alongside disease-modifying or curative treatments, even when a full cure is expected.

How does a patient receive palliative care?
Partners In Care provides palliative care consultations either in person or by telehealth. We are embedded in the oncology and cardiology clinics at Summit Medical Group, available in care facilities, and may at times visit in a patient’s home. Insurance typically covers visits with palliative care specialists in the same manner as they cover other providers.