A palliative care specialist is a medical professional who helps people with life-threatening and non-life-threatening illnesses improve their quality of life. Patients, their families, and caregivers can also benefit from such specialists’ assistance in coping with emotional stress and preparing for difficult decisions that often accompany palliative care. Doctors, physician’s assistants, nurses, nurse practitioners, home care assistants, various types of therapists, counselors, social workers, and volunteers all work in this specialized field of medicine. Palliative care specialists work in a variety of settings, including homes, hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and hospices.
Palliative care refers to treatment that relieves symptoms rather than cures them. In terms of medical care, it is frequently misunderstood as only referring to pain, and palliative care is frequently misunderstood as only referring to the final stages of life, often in a hospice. These misunderstandings can lead to erroneous impressions of palliative care specialists.
A palliative care specialist’s job entails not only relieving pain and improving the quality of life for terminally ill patients in hospices, but also taking a holistic approach to the situation. Other medical conditions that frequently accompany severe illness, such as nausea, appetite loss, fatigue, breathing difficulties, anxiety, and depression, are often treated by members of palliative care teams. They also frequently provide the support network that families require in stressful situations. They can also advise on how to make effective health-care decisions, evaluate options, and locate the best resources to deal with the legal and financial issues that families dealing with members who require palliative care frequently face.
Palliative care can help patients recover from illnesses in some cases. When it doesn’t, and hospice care is the only option left, the palliative care specialist’s work becomes even more important. Palliative care team members are typically in charge of ensuring that terminal patients live out their final days in comfort and dignity. They frequently become the primary sources of information on difficult-to-discuss topics like a durable power of attorney for health care, living will consideration, and grief or bereavement counseling.
Some palliative care experts see unanswered questions about how to meet future needs for the specialty as an urgent world health care issue as medical science continues to help people live longer and extend the lives of patients with terminal diseases. The World Health Organization recently joined a panel of medical experts in estimating that about 30 million of the estimated 60 million people who die each year could benefit significantly from palliative care if it was given to them sooner. The 6 million people who die each year from cancer and another 3 million who die each year from AIDS, according to the group, are the largest groups of people who could be helped.