Baycrest

Baycrest - End of Life Volunteer Manual 7 WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PALLIATIVE CARE AND CURATIVE CARE? Curative care focuses on helping someone recover from an illness by providing active treatment. Palliative Care focuses on providing comfort, reducing symptoms and distress, and providing opportunities for meaningful experiences, personal and spiritual growth, and self-actualization. Palliative Care takes a positive open approach to death and dying, and encourages discussions among the person, family and care team about death and dying, and their wishes for their care at end of life. Palliative Care can be provided on its own or, in some cases, with curative care. For example, a patient may be receiving Palliative Care for cancer while, at the same time, receiving curative care for a respiratory infection. WHERE IS PALLIATIVE CARE PROVIDED? Palliative Care should be available in any setting where people die, including at home, in hospices, in hospital, in long-term and chronic care settings, in shelters and in prisons. The history of "Palliative Care" Dame Cecily Saunders, physician and founder of St. Christopher's House Hospice in London, England, is credited with launching the modern hospice movement. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dame Cecily pioneered an approach to caring for the dying that focused on symptom and pain control and not on curing the underlying terminal illness. As a medical teacher, she lectured health care providers at leading universities and their affiliated teaching hospitals in both North America and Europe. In 1975, Balfour Mount coined the term "palliative care" when he brought the movement to Canada, so that one term would be acceptable in both English and French. Both hospice and palliative care movements have flourished in Canada and internationally. Palliative care programs developed primarily within larger healthcare institutions, while hospice care developed within the community – mainly as free- standing volunteer programs. Over time, these programs gradually evolved from individual, grass roots efforts to a cohesive movement that aims to relieve suffering and improve quality of life for those who are living with or dying from an illness.

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