April 15, 2016 – Palliative Care at Home

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Anchor lead:  People who receive palliative care at home live longer, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Palliative care, which is intended to alleviate symptoms of disease and improve quality of life at every stage of illness, helped people who were dying at home live longer than those who chose to remain hospitalized, a recent large study in the journal Cancer reported.  Rab Razzak, a palliative care expert at Johns Hopkins, says such a care model is spreading rapidly worldwide.

Razzak: One thing we’re trying to do here at Hopkins is build a home-based palliative care model for people who are truly sick and can’t come to clinic. They’re wheelchair bound or they’re so sick they just can’t get out of bed. Those patients will greatly benefit from home-based palliative care so they can actually get better care at home in an environment that’s more comfortable for them, and at the same time we actually get to have the privilege of being in their space to see the environment that they life in and seeing how that environment impacts their health.   :31

Razzak says people at home feel more in control of their environment and also sleep better.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.