Western Baptist offers Palliative Care for life-limiting illnesses

Western Baptist Hospital’s new palliative care program provides comfort to patients with advanced or chronic illness and their families.

“The program is designed to address the complex problems of patients and their families dealing with life-limiting illnesses,” said Western Baptist chaplain D. Preston Figge, M.D., who helped organize the new service.

Palliative means to comfort or to ease. Western Baptist’s goal is to provide the best quality of life possible for those patients, while ensuring their dignity and comfort, he said.

Services include pain and symptom management, as well as social, spiritual, psychological and emotional support. Patients do not have to be in hospice or at the end-of-life to receive palliative care, which is coordinated with a physician’s care.  

An example of how Western Baptist’s medical and nursing staff provided palliative care is the subject of a moving article by Dr. Figge in a national journal.

The article, “A Case Presentation Becomes a Morning Meditation,” is featured in the current issue of Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling.

Figge, a retired physician, recapped a case presentation from the hospital’s recent Clergy Clinical Conference on the compassionate care a Western Baptist patient received before his death.

The patient had entered the hospital with advanced cancer. No family was with him. When his caregivers realized his condition and his situation, they set out to make his last days comfortable, including arranging a reunion with his estranged family. “He became more relaxed as the end neared,” Dr. Figge wrote. “He appreciated the visits from his family and everything the staff did for him.”

Dr. Figge said the case presentation demonstrated that underneath a large, high-tech, fast-moving healthcare system “is a flowing stream of compassion … that recognizes the value of each individual’s need to be loved and respected at the end of life.”

After he presented the story to physicians, chaplains, nurses and others at the conference, “tears welled up in many eyes,” a prayer was uttered and the caregivers filed out quietly, he said. “For us that morning, a case presentation was transformed into a meditation.”

Read the entire article at http://www.westernbaptist.com/Patients+%26+Visitors/A+Case+Presentation+Becomes+a+Morning+Meditation.

For more information on Western Baptist’s palliative care, contact Rita Driver, R.N., at (270) 415-7695.