Services

Palliative Care

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When you are diagnosed with a serious illness, you may not know where to turn. In addition to already-troubling symptoms, you may feel overwhelmed or hopeless. Palliative Care will help you manage your condition at home, while providing all the information you need to make the right decisions about your health care.

A Time to Talk

Palliative Care is a consultative service that helps patients dealing with serious and debilitating illnesses manage their symptoms and improve their quality of life. Unlike hospice care, palliative care services are available to people who are not terminally ill, but are facing an illness that interferes with their ability to cope with and enjoy daily life. Or for those not yet ready for hospice care.  Palliative care is intended to give patients comfort by relieving the pain, symptoms, and stress of serious illness, and is appropriate for anyone, at any age, at any point in the illness, including those seeking curative treatment, and is often used along with other treatments and therapies to help patients manage difficulties that come with chronic illness. Palliative care services are provided in patients’ homes, long-term-care facilities, or assisted living facilities.

Care begins with an initial consultation from the Burke Palliative Care nurse practitioner, where she will recommend ways to relieve your physical symptoms and confer with your doctor on the best approach to easing your symptoms.

The Focus of Palliative Care

Palliative care focuses on the patient's symptoms - symptoms like pain, shortness of breath, fatigue, constipation, nausea, loss of appetite, difficulty sleeping and depression - as well as helping connect the patient and family to appropriate community resources. The goal of our palliative care program is to help the patient gain the strength to carry on with daily life and improve the ability to tolerate medical treatments while remaining at home.  Palliative care is available at any point during your illness.

Medicare, Medicaid and most private insurances cover palliative care.  For those without coverage, Burke Hospice and Palliative Care offers a flexible billing policy, and no one is denied care because of inability to pay.  For more information, call Burke Hospice and Palliative Care at (828) 879-1601 and ask the operator for the Intake Coordinator.