Palliative Care

Bassett Healthcare Network’s palliative care team listens and speaks to each patient to understand how to treat causes of suffering, including physical and mental pain management, spiritual anxieties, and learning to live fully while accepting their illness. We discuss what trade-offs the patient is willing to make to live the way they want, and help align healthcare plans with each patient’s goals and values. We also discuss how much treatment a patient is willing to undergo.

We provide supportive care that focuses on alleviating pain and specific illness-related symptom management, such as shortness of breath, anxiety, fatigue, nausea, loss of appetite, constipation, and diarrhea.

Learning what is important to each patient and what they understand about their illness allows us to help develop care plans that align with our patient’s goals, and allows our patients to more fully understand their options.

This includes navigating change, such as moving from home care to an assisted living facility, or moving from inpatient treatment to hospice care at home. More broadly, we discuss what is next. We discuss our patient’s fears, and help them come to accept and learn to live fully with their illness. We organize meetings with the patient’s family or close friends and the medical teams (such as heart care or cancer care) to ensure that everyone has the same understanding of options at each stage of a condition or illness.

An advanced directive is a legal document that states a patient’s wishes for medical treatment if the patient is unable to communicate with their doctor. This often includes selecting a trusted person, your health care agent, to make medical decisions if you are unable to. Advance care planning documents can include a health care proxy, 5 Wishes, or a MOLST form (Medical Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment).