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Palliative Care

Providing comfort, addressing fears, and improving quality of life.

What is Palliative Care?

To palliate means to provide comfort.

ChristianaCare’s interdisciplinary palliative-care team provides comfort to patients with advanced chronic and serious illness, and to their families. We seek to address your fears and anxieties, lessen your pain and symptoms, and improve your quality of life. We emphasize communication, continuity and coordination of care. We can even help you make decisions about your medical care, including recommendations for medication and referrals as needed.

Managing Your Symptoms

We work with your hospital care team to ease pain, nausea, fatigue, anxiety, shortness of breath and any other symptoms that concern you. Throughout your treatment, we provide emotional and spiritual support to you and your family, and coordination with your primary-care doctor and specialists.

Helping You to Make Decisions About Treatment

You and your family may be presented with many options for managing your inpatient care. Options include home care, a skilled nursing facility, a rehabilitation center or hospice. We can help you to choose what is best for you.

The ChristianaCare palliative care team can help you and your family ask the right questions based on your diagnosis, and we can help you choose an option focused on your quality of life. You have the right to know the status of your illness and what you can expect from treatment. Our team can help you to identify, list and communicate your personal care goals to all of your care providers.

Grief Support

Loss of a spouse, friend or loved one can be difficult to handle on your own, but there is help available. Here are some local and national resources that are available:

  • Delaware Grief Awareness Consortium is a group of interested volunteers with expertise and experience in the delivery of supportive services to grieving children and adults. The Consortium’s mission is to promote the public’s understanding of the processes and expression of grief in friends, families, and communities and to connect people with help and resources when and where they are needed. The website also provides a link to the annual Delaware Grief Resources Directory.
  • Loving Arms Parent Support Group at ChristianaCare is one of the longest continuously running programs in the United States for parents grieving the loss of a baby because of ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage, stillbirth or newborn death.

Your hospital physician or primary-care doctor can request a palliative-care consultation while you are in the hospital.

Contact Us

To contact our team, call 302-733-4186.
For an outpatient consultation, your provider may call our team at 302-623-4960.

Related Content

Loving Arms at ChristianaCare is one of the longest continuously running programs in the United States for parents grieving the loss of a baby because of ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage, stillbirth or newborn death.