Continuing care – palliative care

In some cases, the treatment aimed at curing or controlling the disease it is no longer sufficiently effective. The primary goal then becomes the preserve the patient's quality of life and comfort.

This is at this stage that the "Continuing Care Unit" comes into play. This team consists of doctors who are specialized in oncology, along with family doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, psychologists and social workers. Moreover, there are also volunteers who provide patients and their families with their presence and availability.

Continuing or palliative care constitutes a very specific field. Those who work in this field have been properly trained. They have been taught how to help, how to listen, how to provide psychological support to cancer patients, how to accompany their loved ones, how to control the symptoms of the disease at an advanced stage, and how to make decisions based on the full respect for ethical principles.

The members of the continuing care teams have both common and specific skills. The sum of these skills and competencies contributes to the same objective: the comfort and quality of life of the patient.

In our center, the Continuing Care Unit consists of three entities, including a hospital unit, an interface team, and a mobile team.

The hospital unit exerts several functions. They welcome, if necessary or desired, patients at the end of life and provide them with the specific care requested for this situation.

The members of this unit are also here to evaluate the effect of a treatment administered at an advanced disease stage or to ensure optimal control of certain symptoms, including pain, as well as others. Finally, the loved ones of an end of life patient may also feel the need to "take a break" from the difficult period they are going through.

The architecture of the hospital unit favors both intimacy and conviviality. It is designed to enable relatives to stay there.

The interface team is dedicated to patients whose end of life takes place at home. This team is consulted when the care-givers, who follow the patient on a daily basis, including family doctors, nurses, as well as others, call out for them. They then they offer their help for specific care, such as administering painkillers using a pump. The interface team is also a link between the hospital and the patient’s home.

Finally, the ‘intra muros’ mobile team goes to the bedside of patients hospitalized in the different hospital departments. Like the other teams, it is intended for patients for whom the treatment that was initially aimed at curing or controlling the cancer is no longer satisfactory.

The mobile team also contributes to a better control of the patient’s symptoms, provides psychological support to the patients or their relatives, and helps determine the orientation to be followed upon that patient’s discharge from the specialized service, be it returning home, availability of support service, transfer to the continuous care hospital unit or to a rest and care home, with or without the help of a support team, etc.

Like the interface team, the ‘intra muros’ mobile team intervenes when the department in which the patient is hospitalized requests it.