What is Palliative Care?
Palliative care supports people and their families who are dealing with life-threatening illness and helps them to live as comfortably as possible. By ‘life-threatening’ we mean those conditions that can’t be cured and may at some time result in the person dying, be that years, months, weeks or days away. For example: cancers that can’t be cured but might still be responsive to drugs or radiation; lung, heart, nerve or kidney diseases that get progressively more troublesome despite everything.
A palliative care approach aims to improve quality of life by addressing social, psychological and spiritual needs as well as physical needs such as managing pain and other distressing symptoms.