Palliative Care

What is Palliative Care?

Palliative care focuses on relieving and preventing the distress of patients during a disease or serious illness. Unlike hospice care, palliative care is appropriate for persons in all disease stages. Palliative Care is not the same as Hospice.

Bringing together a professional multidisciplinary team, we specialize in comprehensively assessing what special needs require further attention, including management of pain and physical symptoms and attentiveness to the psychosocial and spiritual dimensions of the person.

This approach guides a care pathway that best honors the individual’s choices as well as their loved one’s preferences.

Who is a candidate?

• Someone who is in distress in some aspect(s) of their own or their loved one’s serious illness at any stage of the disease.
• Residents in long-term care who have a serious illness which is chronic, debilitating, or life-threatening.

Services

• Comprehensive and ongoing multidisciplinary assessments of you/your loved one’s condition.
• Individualized plan of care, honoring you and your loved ones’ input regarding goals and interventions.
• Increased level of 1:1 attention and communication from our multidisciplinary team to you and your loved ones.
• Disease education provided by certified and trained staff and/or referral sources to allow for a thorough understanding of the serious illness.
• Individualized education on the drug therapies that are being used, or that may be used, specific to your illness and set of symptoms.
• Referrals to specialty sources of assistance based on identified distress that you or your loved ones are experiencing.
• Ongoing evaluation of how well the care plan is meeting your and your loved ones’ goals of care and relief from discomfort or other distressing symptoms.
• In cases where the disease process has progressed to the need for an end-of-life plan of care, we will assist you and your loved ones with an appropriately timed referral to Hospice.

How do I sign up? Does it cost me anything?

If you are interested in discovering if you or your loved one is a candidate, please contact the Social Worker or Clinical Manager. There is no additional cost to be in our Palliative Care program.

Contact us:

Leigh Emmerich, LSW
651.632.5370
lemmerich@lyngblomsten.org.