Fit and Well: Palliative and supportive care

TWIN FALLS, Idaho (KMVT/KSVT) — Palliative and supportive care is used to help patients to achieve their best quality of life.

This week’s Fit and Well Idaho report focuses on how they do that.

Palliative care helps patients with serious illnesses, like chronic lung disease, heart failure, liver disease, and stage four cancer.

This special care helps address needs that are not just medical but emotional and social as well.

Consider it an additional layer of support that focuses on the whole patient.

“We focus a lot on symptom burden,” said Dr. Daniel Preucil, the Medical Director of Palliative Medicine at St. Luke’s Magic Valley. “If they have nausea, if they have bowel problems or breathing difficulties, we focus our treatments on trying to control those symptoms. When you ask people who have serious medical problems what is the most important thing for you as we move forward the number one answer is I don’t want to suffer.”

Education is also a component so that patients can better understand their options. Making that happen takes a team.

Palliative care uses social workers, chaplains, nurses, nutritionists and therapists.

They do use outpatient and inpatient services, but they are not hospice.

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