"Palliative care has traditionally focused on end-of-life care for patients with advanced cancer. This has since expanded to include symptom management and quality-of-life improvement from the moment of cancer diagnosis."
per Gouldthorpe, C. et al., Cancers. 2023.
Palliative & Supportive Care
What is Palliative Care?
Palliative care teams offer side effect support to any patient at any stage of a serious illness, and services can be delivered in an office or clinic, at a hospital, or at home. Palliative care is delivered by a specialized, multi-disciplinary team that includes doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains, therapists, counselors, and other healthcare workers. Cancer patients can receive palliative care during active treatment to help relieve side effects, pain, emotional distress, and preserve quality of life or at any time from diagnosis through surveillance, remission, and survivorship.
You can take advantage of palliative care during treatment to improve your quality of life, manage and alleviate side effects, reduce or control pain, increase overall well-being and mental health, improve your ability to move and function, assist with appetite issues, offer spiritual support, and more. Some patients may mistakenly think they have to “tough out” the side effects for the best treatment outcome, but that's not the case.
"Palliative care improves the quality of life for patients who have cancer and their families and has also been shown to improve survival when combined with other treatments. However, palliative care remains substantially underused in the United States and was received by only 10% of patients with solid tumors in one large study." (source)
Palliative care can also be provided at the end of life so some may confuse it with hospice care. While they do provide some of the same services, hospice care is distinctly for patients who have six months or less to live.
- In 2023, the NCCN published the NCCN Guidelines for Patients: Palliative Care. Toby Campbell, MD, MS, University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center, Vice-Chair of the NCCN Guidelines Panel for Palliative Care, had this to say about it: "Palliative care gives people a big picture view of what it’s like to navigate the cancer care experience across the scope of care, beginning with diagnosis. These patient guidelines will help enable difficult conversations and affirm that people with cancer can make treatment choices based on what matters to them. Palliative care is also how we navigate symptoms and make it easier for patients to ‘weather the storm."
A number of studies, including the quoted below, have noted that earlier involvement with palliative care leads to better patient outcomes.
- According to the 2018 ASCO Palliative Care Expert Panel, "Concurrent palliative care alongside usual oncology care is now recommended by ASCO for all patients with advanced cancer. Concurrent specialty care should start within 8 weeks of diagnosis and be delivered by an interdisciplinary team."
- In a study on non-small cell lung cancer patients within the VA (Veterans Health Administration), the researchers found, "Palliative care was associated with a survival benefit. The timing of the receipt of palliative care was important; palliative care received 31 to 365 days after diagnosis was associated with increased survival."
There's more in store for this page. Stay tuned! In the meantime, please take advantage of the resource collection below to learn more about palliative care. If you haven't yet visited the Newly Diagnosed page for a thorough overview of the early cancer experience, please check it out.
