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Palliative care specialists improve the quality of life for those in extreme pain from life-threatening and non-life-threatening illnesses. They also help patients, families, and caregivers deal with emotional stress and difficult decisions. Palliative care is often misunderstood and includes a holistic approach to alleviate pain and other medical conditions. The role of a palliative care specialist is significant in ensuring terminally ill patients live out their final days in comfort and dignity. The need for palliative care is increasing as medical science helps people live longer. The World Health Organization estimates that 30 million people could benefit from palliative care each year.
A palliative care specialist is a medical professional who improves the quality of life for people who are in extreme pain from both life-threatening and non-life-threatening illnesses. These specialists also help patients, families, and caregivers deal with the emotional stress and prepare for the difficult decisions that often accompany palliative care. Workers in this specialized field of medicine include physicians, physician assistants, registered nurses, nurse practitioners, home care assistants, various types of therapists, counselors, social workers and volunteers. A palliative care specialist typically works in homes, hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and hospices.
The term palliative means relieving without curing. In terms of medical care, it is often mistakenly associated only with pain, and palliative care is also misunderstood as only belonging to the final stages of life, often in a hospice. These misconceptions can lead to inaccurate perceptions of a palliative care specialist.
The role of a palliative care specialist certainly involves alleviating pain and improving the quality of life of terminally ill patients in hospitals, but it extends far beyond that in a holistic approach to the whole situation. Members of palliative care teams also often help alleviate other medical conditions that often accompany serious illness, such as nausea, loss of appetite, fatigue, breathing difficulties, anxiety and depression. They also often provide the support system that family members typically need in stressful situations. They can often provide advice on how to make effective health care decisions, evaluate options, and find the best resources for dealing with the legal and financial issues that families with members needing palliative care often require.
In some cases, palliative care helps patients recover from illness. When this does not happen and palliative care is the only option left, the work of the palliative care specialist takes on special significance. Members of a palliative care team often have primary responsibility for ensuring that terminally ill patients live out their final days in comfort and dignity. They often become the main sources of information on topics that can be difficult to discuss, such as a durable power of attorney for health care, consideration of a living will, and sources of grief or bereavement counseling.
As medical science continues to help people live longer and extend the lives of terminally ill patients, some palliative care specialists see unanswered questions about how to meet the specialty’s future needs as a pressing issue in the healthcare world. The World Health Organization recently joined a panel of medical experts to estimate that approximately 30 million of the estimated 60 million people who die each year could significantly benefit from palliative care if they received it early. The group stated that the largest groups of people who could be helped were the 6 million people who die each year from cancer and another 3 million who annually succumb to AIDS.
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