Retired nurse Cathy Rafa-Hern talks about caring for the whole of a person as part of palliative care.--NEWS PHOTO ANNA SMITH
asmith@medicinehatnews.com
In the basement of St. Joseph’s Home, health-care workers from across the city took the time Thursday to learn to better care for and advocate for those facing some of the most difficult diagnoses of their lives.
Pallilearn is a program led by Palliative Care South Australia and adapted locally by the Covenant Health Palliative Institute, to help health-care professionals and the general public alike learn more about the world surrounding this stage of care and what it actually means to be receiving it.
On Thursday, health-care aide Karen Ristau and retired nurse Cathy Rafa-Hern presented the four-part course to a full room of health-care workers from various organizations throughout Medicine Hat, many of whom had limited experience working with palliative patients. As palliative care is often not a mandatory part of training, this is a common barrier to accessing this important care, says Rafa-Hern.
“A few months ago, we asked, ‘What can we do for the community to be engaged and get to know more of the great care that we do at St Joseph’s?'” said site administrator Ryan Weist. “Mostly what we’re known for in Medicine Hat is the Carmel hospice and the palliative care that we do.”
“We thought, ,’Why don’t we educate everybody else on what palliative is?’ Because a lot of people don’t know what palliative is, and they don’t want to know what palliative is, because the word is scary.”
The two educators for the course both work at St. Joseph’s, making it a natural fit for the facility.
The program covered many major misconceptions surrounding palliative care, including the widespread idea that it is synonymous with hospice care, or that receiving palliative care means the health-care team has given up on the patient in question.
In reality, palliative care is an extremely active form of care for those who have received a serious diagnosis, often for life-limiting illnesses that have treatments but no cure. This care can be for anyone of any age, and includes those who may have months or years to live. The goal of palliative care, explains Rafa-Hern, is to create the best possible quality of life for the patient, as defined by the patient.
It can start as early as upon receiving the initial diagnosis, and in fact early palliative care has shown to result in less depression, symptoms from the illness and associated treatments to be less severe and even patients living longer.
In contrast, hospice is care primarily focused on providing comfort and is for those who are approaching the end of their lives and cannot or do not want to receive further treatment.
To accomplish this, palliative care combines symptom and pain management with emotional, social and spiritual support to create a comfortable life, which can be lived to the fullest. It does not, she stresses, cause death to occur sooner.
The course covered broad concepts and values associated with palliative care, as well as ways to identify what matters most to a person facing such an illness, how to have the difficult conversations surrounding the concept with compassion and how to best build networks of support within the community.
Attendees discussed the various places and forms palliative care can take place in,
While this session was largely tailored toward health-care professionals, Weist says St. Joseph’s is interested in potentially presenting the course again for the general public in the future, especially after seeing the level of interest.
“I believe that people will learn from this today, and then they can take that back to their other sites where they work and, hopefully, our team can share this with the community in the future,” said Weist.
