Inpatient Palliative Care

The palliative care team at Glens Falls Hospital offers an elevated approach to illness that focuses on relieving pain and alleviating stress. We are here to help you and your family navigate the journey through serious illness.

What is Palliative Care?

Palliative care is specialized medical care for people with serious illnesses like COPD, congestive heart failure, kidney disease, cancer, Parkinson’s disease or dementia.  It is available to patients at any stage of an illness. Palliative care helps people live as well as they can for as long as they can.

The Palliative Care team provides support based on your specific needs and will coordinate with your medical and surgical specialists to give you the best guidance and care that we can under the circumstances of your hospitalization. Services might include:

• Managing symptoms like pain and anxiety that interfere with daily life
• Meeting with you and your family to discuss your disease and the benefits and risks of treatments and procedures
• Providing information about what to expect in the future so that you can decide what treatments are right for you
• Helping you manage the stress of serious illness
• Exploring your situation and recommending support services in your home, to enhance quality of life at home and potentially prevent the need to return to the hospital
• Assisting you to complete advance directives such as a health care proxy and living will

Our mission is to improve the quality of life, reduce suffering and enhance the hospital experience of our patients with serious illness.  We advocate for informed decision-making and support the identification of patient and family preferences and goals. We collaborate with the full Glens Falls Hospital care team to apply evidence-based treatment for relief of pain, and other symptoms, with an interdisciplinary approach to reduce physical, psychosocial and spiritual suffering of our patients and their families.