Palliative care helps patients with life-limiting illnesses

Nov. 24--ASHLAND -- Community Palliative Care has been helping patients navigate their life-limiting illnesses from the comfort of their own homes for the past two years.

The program is a subsidiary of Community Hospice and provides system management, education surrounding disease progression, medications and treatment and offers advance care planning.

"We try to palliate systems, palliate meaning basically to control systems to keep the patient comfortable and try to control the systems so that they don't have to go back to the hospital to have that done," said Julie Carr, Palliative Care nurse practitioner.

Carr said there are currently 130 patients in the program who are each seen once a month on average. Services are provided to patients either in their own home, skilled nursing facility or assisted living facility. She explained the program is not the same as home health, noting there is a definitive line between the two.

Palliative care acts as a case manager for patients, allowing participants to still see their routine doctors. The program helps coordinate care for patients, even sometimes working with home health to run tests to allow patients to have their care from their home.

"It truly is a community asset in that we can try to keep people from having those readmissions and just going back and forth. It's been very well received so far," said Carr, who pointed out that patients must be homebound and have a chronic illness to be in the program.

Palliative care is also not the same as hospice in that patients can still receive curative and life-prolonging treatment while those in hospice do not.

"Palliative care is for patients that are having difficulties with symptom control but they're not really terminally ill with six months or less to live," explained Community Hospice Executive Director Susan Hunt.

The two also overall have different goals with palliative care aiming to improve the quality of life for the patient and their family and hospice aiming to provide comfort, offering patients 24-hour nursing care.

Community Hospice Medical Director Dr. Kristie Downs touched on the benefits of the program saying she feels it is a valuable service to the community.

"I think it's been really affective in helping a lot of people and it's something we definitely need," she said.

Community Hospice also works closely with the Palliative Care providers at Our Lady of Bellefonte Hospital and King's Daughters Medical Center. KDMC Nurse Practitioner Todd Hellmich said the program is extremely helpful, noting there is new research that shows connecting patients with chronic illnesses to services like palliative care early on can extend and improve their quality of life.

"I think it's an immense benefit to patients to be involved in this program," he said.

KDMC Palliative Care Director Heidi Moore said it is also of great benefit since it allows patients to be in their own homes and spend more time with their families.

Kim Jones, Manager of Palliative care at OLBH, said referrals to the palliative care program are made on a daily basis.

"A lot of time patients feel like they're on their own and don't know what to do but having that provider in there helps give them support and not only that, but also know that they're not alone, there's other patients out there like themselves and it helps them deal with the problem as well," she said about palliative care.

Medicare Part B pays 80 percent of palliative care services. The remainder is billed to either secondary insurance or the patient. While referrals can come from hospitals Carr said no physician is needed to do so and that friends and family can make make them as well. Referrals can be made by calling (606) 329-1890.

(606) 326-2653 -- radkins@dailyindependent.com

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