What is palliative care?
What is palliative care? UCLA Health Palliative Care Services.

Palliative Care is a consultative service that provides co-management along with a primary provider. It is specialized interdisciplinary medical care focused on relieving the pain, symptoms and stress of serious illness. The Palliative providers work with the patient and, as appropriate, their family to navigate treatment plans to best achieve the patient’s goals.

How does palliative care work?
The Palliative Care team visits with chronically, critically or terminally ill patients and their loved ones in the hospital to better understand what is important to them. The goal is to provide the best quality of life possible by ensuring comfort and dignity throughout the disease process.

Who can be served by palliative care?
Anyone who is suffering from a critical or chronic illness and their loved ones may benefit from Palliative Care services.

Alzheimer’s and dementia can be challenging for everyone involved, causing you to feel a range of emotions or ask yourself questions like: What's going to happen to my loved one's health? But the more you know what to expect and how to prepare, the more it can make the journey feel less daunting.

You also don't have to go through this alone. If you do feel like you need outside assistance, memory care communities are a wonderful environment ideal for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. In fact, studies show that seniors living in memory care communities often experience a higher quality of life than when they live at home. With us, your loved one would live in an apartment-like home with safety features, surrounded by their peers and nurturing staff members.

Treatment Programs
We strive to provide individuals with compassionate treatment that serves as a foundation for continued hope, healing and recovery. Our facilities offer a broad range of inpatient and outpatient treatment options for adolescents, adults and senior adults. The goal of our programs is to help patients stabilize as quickly as possible and return home with new coping skills.

Every one of our programs provides highly individualized treatment tailored to meet the needs and goals of each patient based on a review of their history, assessments and input from the the patient, family and referral source. Treatment is provided by a multidisciplinary team of psychiatrists, therapists, nurses, social workers and mental health technicians.

Our treatment team is experienced in caring for those with suicidal or homicidal thoughts, substance use disorders, co-occurring disorders, mood and anxiety disorders and trauma-related issues.

After completing a program, patients may transition to a less intensive level of care for continued progress and reduced risk of rehospitalization. Recovery Dynamics is a component of all our inpatient and outpatient programs.