Palliative Care Plan

Palliative care is a multidisciplinary specialized medical care of people with life limiting illness. It focuses on providing patients and their family members with relief from the symptoms such as pain, physical discomfort, and mental stress.

Bangladesh is right at the bottom of the pile when it comes to providing palliative care for its inhabitants, says a recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

Palliative care is all about accomplishing the possible highest quality of life (QOL) and promoting relieve and dignity for patients whose are suffering with incurable and life limiting diseases. The aspects of the palliative care in Bangladesh concern the matters of concentrating on the rights of the patients in getting release from

Help the palliative care team to facilitate patient – family meetings for setting the goal of treatment and also the care planning

3. Coordinate educational and other services relevant to palliative care interface

4. Participate in ensuring the quality of the palliative care by functioning liaison betweenpalliative care team and hospital quality improvement, infection control, and social service team.

5. Attends monthly and periodic team meetings for operational and administrative functions of the palliative care services

Plan for initiation of a palliative care unit in our existing set up

Aim: The aim of establishing a palliative care programme in my hospital is to improve the quality of life for the patient and their family.

Who needs palliative care:

Those who have incurable disease / life limiting illness.

When physician find no strong evidence that treatment would be effective

Patient has very low performance status

Patient received no benefit from prior evidence based treatments

Objective of palliative care:

• Relief of pain and other worrying symptoms, which could be beyond physical symptoms

• Sustains life and regards dying as a normal sequence

• Intention would be neither to hasten not postpone death

• Integrates the psychological and spiritual aspects of patient

Coordinates the development, implementation and revisions of medical regimes and symptom management based on established and approved protocols for the palliative care patient in our Centre. Works as a member of the inpatient interdisciplinary patient care teams and consults with the Nurse Practitioner and Medical Director on complex patient care issues.

2. Proactively identifies appropriate palliative referrals within the hospital setting, assesses them based on patient/family goals to determine which service and setting is most appropriate. Coordinates the initiation of palliative care for inpatient and then eventually home care settings. Informs patients/families about the benefit and assures continuity of care between settings, physicians and care team members.

3. Provides education to physicians, inpatient clinical staff, patient caregivers, and the family members regarding pain and symptom management and end of life care

While speaking about cost effectiveness of palliative care, research shows that palliative care can actually save money, especially when introduced early and where patients have comples needs. (ehospice, UK). Usually palliative care ensure reducing unnecessary hospital admission and enable more people to die in their preffered place, but if we have a palliative care set up in our hospital we can assure patient’s autonomy in greater dimension and can actually beneficial for both the