Palliative Care

Who is offered palliative care?

Patients sometimes think that palliative care is only offered to people at the end of their lives. And while this can be the case, palliative care is also provided to patients whose cancer cannot be cured but who are receiving treatment that could extend their life… sometimes for many years. We understand that it can be distressing to be told you will receive palliative care, but our team works hard to reassure people and let them know that we are here beside them. Our palliative care team is entirely focused on supporting you in whatever way would help you the most to live a full and meaningful life.

What is palliative care?

Palliative care aims to improve your quality of life by:

• Providing emotional, practical and spiritual support.
• Helping you to manage the side-effects of cancer treatment.
• Giving you pain-relief.
• Supporting you to remain as active as possible and to help you have quality of life.
• Being at your side throughout your cancer treatment.
• Offering support to your family to help them cope.
• Helping you to see dying as a natural process and come to terms with the end of life.

We offer palliative care to our patients who are diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer to help them cope with the emotional and physical impact. You can choose whether to take up the offer of care at this point or when your treatment ceases because it is no longer effective.

Alongside emotional, practical and spiritual support, our palliative care team can also provide pain relief, biological therapies, complementary therapies, chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

We also offer counselling and access to other healthcare professionals such as dieticians and physiotherapists.

We can also put you and your family in touch with other organisations who can support you during difficult times.