Palliative Care

Choosing Children's National for Palliative Care

Palliative care helps strengthen your child’s body, mind and spirit when they experience symptoms that come with a serious illness. With the help of our experts easing these symptoms can:

• Help provide the best possible quality of life for your child
  
• Make your child better able to handle medical treatments
  
• Help family members cope with the feelings and emotions of having a sick child

Through palliative care, our interdisciplinary team can help relieved symptoms such as: 

• Constipation
  
• Fear, anxiety, stress
  
• Loss of appetite
  
• Nausea and vomiting
  
• Pain
  
• Problems with sleep
  
• Shortness of breath
  
• Tiredness

Services We Provide

Our goal is to make your child as comfortable as possible and to have the best quality of life possible. We do that by providing your child with:

• Pain and symptom management

• Care planning and goal setting

• Religious and spiritual support

• Opportunities to create memories

• Support for sisters and brothers

• Coordinated care with primary care providers

• Grief and bereavement services

Our Butterfly Team

The Butterfly Team is a group of professional experts in pediatric palliative care. Members work together with the child, family, and their unit-based care team to make sure that the child and family have the best quality of life possible. This includes making every effort to provide surroundings that create a climate of sensitivity, privacy and comfort for the child and family. Some of the services they provided are: 

• Care planning and goal setting 
  
• Collaboration with primary providers
  
• Grief and bereavement services
  
• Integrative therapies
  
• Memory and legacy making
  
• Pain and symptom management
  
• Spiritual and emotional support
  
• Support for the whole family including siblings

Our mission is to provide active and holistic care for children and young people and their families experiencing a life-limiting illness in a supportive environment that focuses on enhancement of quality of life, family support, and management of distressing symptoms while respecting their beliefs, values and priorities.