What is palliative care?

What is palliative care? So palliative care is specialized health care for people with serious illness and it ultimately provides an extra layer of support for patients and families and caregivers when they're dealing with a serious illness like a cancer, a blood cancer like AML, a solid organ tumor or even other kinds of serious illnesses like heart failure, chronic lung disease, etc. And the goal of palliative care really is to better understand what's important to that patient and their family and caregivers and to address the things that are bothering them the most when they're dealing with a serious illness. So that could be assessing and managing symptoms better, addressing quality of life issues, dealing with uncertainty, helping with coping, psychological distress, anxiety, depression, spiritual issues, etc. And palliative care is provided now by a specialized group, an interdisciplinary team that includes not only physicians or advanced practice clinicians but also nurses, medical assistants, NAs, social workers, chaplains, etc. A whole team of people who can help better attend to the whole person. And accordingly, palliative care is appropriate at any stage and at any age in a serious illness and can be provided even along with curative intent therapies. And in fact, we've studied it as part of high dose chemotherapy for AML or hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for hematologic malignancies and found that adding the extra layer of support of specialist palliative care dramatically improves the patient and caregiver experience of blood cancer care.