Palliative care is given to patients suffering from chronic life threatening illnesses like Cancer, Heart Diseases and Kidney dysfunction. It can be given in various phases of diseases, to lower the impact of the harsh symptoms. Palliative Care helps the patient and the family cope with the emotional and physical misery caused due to long term ailment. It creates conducive environment for the family. Curative therapies which aim to treat the disease by an active approach of medications and surgery also supplement the Palliative Care therapies.
Palliative Care relieves the pain of the disease symptoms by giving the patients much required physical, mental and emotional support and care. The palliative care programs include supervision and guidance from Doctors, Nurses, Physiotherapists, Psychologists and Social workers.
Goals of Palliative Care
Palliative care provides a high quality of life to the patients suffering from chronic illnesses like Cancer, Cardiovascular diseases and Renal Failure. Cardiac diseases include CHF – Congestive Heart Failure and COPD – Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Palliative care also takes care of patients with Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease, where patients are highly dependent on others for daily activities and care. These patients need someone constantly by their side for emotional support and assistance in movements. They need help in eating food, changing clothes and walking even a small distance. Palliative Care takes care of all such needs of the patient and provide them with holistic support.
Benefits of Palliative Care
Palliative care helps patients suffering with a broad range of issues. It focuses on easing the severity of the disease symptoms and painful treatment procedures. Patients suffering from chronic illnesses face depression, anxiety, fatigue and difficulty in sleeping. They undergo frequent pain, nausea and loss of appetite.
- Palliative Care helps the patients regain strength to sustain everyday life.
- Palliative Care inculcates the strength and tolerance in patients to undergo rigorous medical treatments.
- Palliative care makes the patients and family understand the range of treatments available for chronic illnesses and make an informed choice.
- Palliative care also helps the family to choose the right caregivers and provide practical support.
Awareness of Patients about Palliative Care
Patients suffering from chronic illnesses are largely unaware of the Palliative care services since the beginning. Only when a person faces a critical condition and needs full-time medical help, then only families look for Care services. It is then they discover about palliative care in detail. The awareness about palliative care should be spread, since the aging population in India is increasing, the cases of Cardiac diseases and cancer have risen and nuclear families are growing. The cases of Palliative care have risen by 52% since the past 10 years. This signifies that there will be an increase in demand for the palliative care. So we should bridge the gap between the lack of awareness about palliative care and number of cases rising for the same.
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