BETA - What is the role of palliative care on your healthcare team?

Palliative care is all about helping you live as well as possible while managing a serious illness like multiple myeloma. It's not just for end-of-life care. It's available at any age and any stage of your journey. A palliative care team brings together doctors, nurses, social workers, and other specialists who focus on relieving symptoms, reducing stress, and supporting you and your loved ones emotionally and practically. They work alongside your other doctors to make sure your care is as comfortable and personalized as possible. In this Health Tree University lesson, you'll learn why having a palliative care team in your corner can make a real difference in your quality of life. What is a palliative care team and how does it differ from hospice care? Palliative care is a fantastic service that if I could make sure that every cancer patient when they came in to start their care also got a referral to palliative care, that would be like my main goal in life. I think palliative care people tend to confuse it with hospice care, but this is sort of how I try to explain palliative care to folks. It's for people with serious illness that are also struggling with symptoms related to that illness. Symptoms can be anything from pain, insomnia, depression, fatigue, spiritual issues, why did this happen to me, sort of that existential stuff. Palliative care is delivered by a team of providers. There's usually a physician, a nurse practitioner, a chaplain, and a social worker who are attending using that word a lot, attending to the needs of the full patient. Not just looking at the patient through the lens of their cancer diagnosis, but look at the whole needs of the patient and how their disease and the associated symptoms with that disease and the treatment that we are using to treat that illness are affecting the patient's ability to have quality of life. Quality of life means a lot of things to a lot of people. We all define that in a different way. The palliative care team really tries to get at that individual definition of what makes life worth living for you, and then they try to make sure that you can do that as comfortably and safely as you can. It differs a little bit from hospice care. Certainly palliative care is part of hospice care, but you can get palliative care at any point during the course of your diagnosis and your treatment, versus hospice care, which is really for folks who their health care team feels like the disease will likely result in their death within six months or so. This is really focused at end of life care. Again, palliative care is part of that, managing symptoms, but the hospice care is also very similar to palliative care in that it's delivered by this great team of professionals who are really trying to kind of envelope the patient and their family in care. The main difference is with hospice, it tends to be at the end of life, but with palliative care, it's at any point during the disease trajectory. There's been a great influx into the number of palliative care providers all over the country in the last 10 to 15 years. Again, I mentioned the Commission on Cancer accreditation, and another part of that accreditation is that palliative care services are available either on-site or by referral to patients, and that each cancer organization has a method, a plan in place to link patients to palliative care services if they desire. Having a palliative care team member on your medical team is really important. You can actually consult them at any point for different types of side effects related to the chemotherapy or the therapies, and this can range anywhere from sleep, fatigue, as well as eating, and pain as well. So having a palliative care specialist is not something that you necessarily need at the end of life. You know, oftentimes we will think about it in those manners, but they're good to have at any point during your care, and they can really help with side effects that sometimes maybe your general oncologist can't necessarily address. Finding a palliative care doctor is dependent on where you are getting your treatment. So I would suggest that the first thing that you want to do is go to your treating oncologist and really ask them whether or not they have a specialist that they closely work with to sort of address the needs of, you know, your specific case. So starting out with just your general oncologist and going from there would be the best bet to try to find this palliative care specialist. You should talk with your primary care oncologist and say, I'd like to see palliative care. It does need to be a referral, and sometimes your insurance will require a referral because it is a specialist. And so you also may have different co-pays associated with seeing a palliative care specialist like you do when you see an oncologist and maybe you see from your primary care doctor. It all depends on your insurance. You can also contact your insurance company and ask them about your coverage for palliative care services as well as if they have preferred providers for palliative care in your network.