Allison Silvers Discusses the Importance of Palliative Care Integration for Complex Patients

Palliative care can help alleviate the suffering and symptoms that go along with serious disease, making it an important component when caring for complex, high-need patients, said Allison Silvers, vice president of payment and policy at the Center to Advance Palliative Care.

Transcript (slightly modified)

Why is it important to increase access to palliative care for complex and high need patients?

Well, that’s an easy question. I think every complex, high-need, seriously ill patient should have palliative care. What palliative care really boils down to is relieving any suffering that goes along with having that complex or serious need, so it should be part and parcel. There’s pain that goes along with a lot of conditions, there’s a variety of other symptoms, there’s functional impairment, so even with things like COPD, you suddenly become limited in what you can do, maybe not so suddenly sometimes, there’s obviously a lot of gradual deterioration in populations as well.

But there are ways to relieve the pain, the symptoms, to get support for the places where you need support. So I think palliative care needs to be just completely integrated into the care of seriously ill and complex populations.