How Palliative Care Can Help Your Family
Caring for a loved one with a serious or terminal illness affects everyone in the family, not just the patient. Palliative care focuses on improving the quality of life for both patients and their families, providing emotional support, symptom relief, and guidance during this challenging journey. Here’s how palliative care can make a difference for your family.
A terminal or serious illness can be trying for everyone involved, including the patient, the family, and even the caregivers. Palliative care aims to improve the quality of life for the patient, as well as the patient’s family, by providing relief from symptoms and helping to alleviate stress. Here are a few ways this supportive care can help your family during this trying time:
Provide Patient’s Symptom Management
One of the most important things that palliative care does for both patient and family is to help provide relief to the patient from symptoms – even if that relief is only partial or temporary. Patients suffering from cancer, lung disease, and other serious illnesses can suffer from debilitating pain, nausea, constipation, insomnia, and depression, among other serious side effects. The care team can help the patient manage these symptoms through medication, holistic practices, and more.
Not only will the patient feel better, but so will the family. When your loved one is in so much pain and agony, you can feel desperate and hopeless. You want to make that pain stop, but you know that there is nothing you can do yourself. You may start to lose sleep yourself, experience severe anxiety, stop eating, and even become ill yourself. By helping the patient to manage these symptoms, the palliative care team can ease your mind and help you to focus on other ways that you can be helpful to the patient and to the rest of your family.
Coordinate Care
Another stressful aspect of helping a loved one who is seriously ill is managing all the care required. You have to make doctor’s appointments, call nurses for refills or for questions about medication, log on to check test results, and so on. You may have a team of specialists, assistants, and aid workers on your loved one’s care team, and coordinating them all can be a lot of work.
Your palliative care worker or team can take over those duties for you. Your team will coordinate with other care providers to make appointments, manage medications, or provide feedback about symptoms. Your team can also help you to establish goals for care or to make important decisions about care.
Offer Support
No matter how much you love the person who is seriously ill, the situation is going to be inherently stressful. Whether you are involved in managing care, see the person’s suffering every day, or just get check-ins from afar and have to grapple with the imminent loss of someone you love, you are likely to have feelings of intense stress, anxiety, sadness, and even depression.
Palliative care workers can help you to feel less overwhelmed and to reduce your feelings of stress and anxiety. They can suggest resources like therapists or support groups for you, help you manage the day-to-day needs of the patient, and just offer a listening ear.
Palliative care can help your ill loved one and your family. You should consider having a palliative worker on your side whether your loved one is facing a terminal illness or is suffering a serious illness. If your loved one needs intensive medical care or home health workers, chances are good that palliative care will help your loved one and your family.
Published By:
1212 N. Spencer St., Suite #2
Mesa, Arizona 85203
Office: (480) 726-7773
Fax: (480) 726-7790
Email: info@americarehospice.org
