Question

What are the benefits of interdisciplinary team management of patient care as practiced in hospice and palliative care? Are there potential lessons learned for improving the quality of traditional medical care?

Answer 1

The interdisciplinary team includes the physicians, nurses, home health aide, social worker ,counselor,chaplains,therapist and trained volunteers.

They actually means end of life care,but the benefits reach far behind a patients physical condition to cover spiritual and psychosocial needs of patients and it's relative.

Some of the benefits are

Medical care: it provides the basic medical devices like wheel chair,bed etc.,

Freedom to choose: patients and relative both has the right to involve and suggest treatment plan

Prevents hospitalisation: patients are treated in a familiar homely environment

Emotional support: they offer companionship to patients and relative,listen to them patiently.

Spiritual care: this soothes the patients to a greater extent giving them a peace of mind

Respite care: they are available for 5 days where the care giver could take few hours break.

Hence interdisciplinary approach is considered to be the most important benefits of hospice and palliative care.

The traditional medical care generally involves the knowledge, skills, belief, practices based on the theories, helps to diagnose, prevention, improvement of treatment and Medical illness

Potentially a lot of these can be taken into consideration for improving the quality of palliative care