Catholic Health Care and Models for Advancing Excellence in Palliative Care

Abstract

Palliative care is like a fine symphony orchestra. Each palliative care team member, like the musician, spends many hours seeking higher education in their distinctive field, fine-tuning their skills, and applying their learnings with delicacy and finesse. Each discipline brings to its particular modality a sense of mastery, and to the whole, a sense of personal responsibility. Palliative and end of life care is like a fine composition with common themes, variation, and, inevitably, a cadence and an ending. Palliative care professionals attend to each patient and family with sensitivity to the common themes of physical pain and emotional grief, and to the uniquely personal variables of each individual they care for. They listen to what truly matters to their patients and are attuned to their individual choices regarding care. Many national palliative care groups contribute to a broad understanding of what constitutes excellence in palliative care. Consensus standards have evolved through rigorous study and analysis. Catholic health care has contributed significantly to this substantive foundational body of work and continues to expand upon it through innovation and excellence. There are many palliative care programs within Catholic health care that serve as exemplars, raising the bar and advancing the field of palliative care. For palliative care to thrive in Catholic health care (and in other-than-Catholic settings as well) there must be strong organizational commitment and a shared vision that palliative care is not only specialized care for the seriously ill and dying, but also a model of whole person care to be emulated across the entire heath care delivery system.