The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Jonathon Naylor Editor On the third floor of the Flin Flon General Hospital, at the north end of a broad, bright hallway, are two rooms. Each lined with comfy furniture, handsome wall art and a waist-high fridge, they are not what you would expect to find in a health-care setting. But as cozy as these rooms may be, patients are often reluctant to venture inside. Such is the stigma of palliative _ or end-of-life _ care. 'The mindset in the community seems to be that the minute you're palliative, you're at the end and it's done,' says Darlene Larson, nurse manager of the third floor. 'And that's not how palliative care should be presented.' Larson is working to change the perceptions of palliative care among local patients diagnosed with a terminal illness, such as cancer, and their families. The value is not necessarily that the patients will live longer, but that their final weeks, months or years will offer quality time with minimal pain and discomfort. Since being diagnosed with a terminal illness can be frightening, Larson has detected among patients a fear that once they enter a palliative care room, if only temporarily, they may never leave. But she stresses the importance of perspective. Many palliative patients only require scheduled visits to the hospital for things such as blood transfusions. And, Larson points out, a terminal diagnosis 'doesn't mean that you've got six weeks to live _ you can be palliative for years.' 'There's no evidence to show that palliative care shortens a life, but there is evidence to show that it improves the quality of life,' she adds. Nellie Brown, an RN who works with Larson, stresses the importance of patients undergoing palliative care as soon as they are diagnosed. 'There's a lot of people in the community, especially older populations, that think part of dying is the pain,' she says. 'And they stay at home and their pain progressively gets worse, and it's not managed, but they think that it's part of dying, it's part of the disease or it's part of the process. 'They need to be encouraged to come to the hospital sooner as the goal of palliative care is to manage symptoms, and pain is the most undermanaged symptom as reported by patients. And once the pain is managed, they again have quality of life and may go home.' Palliative care is by no means new to Flin Flon. The hospital has always had a room designated for this purpose, though has now added a second room to meet the unfortunate demand. The rooms have been furnished and decorated to 'make it a little bit more homey' for patients, Larson says. Aside from the furniture, decor and fridges, each room has a hospital bed topped not with a traditional mattress, but with an air mattress. This increases comfort, decreases bed sores and means patients do not have to be turned as frequently. Patients also have their own desk, microwave and coffeemaker (real mugs, no styrofoam). Like patients in other rooms, they also have a TV. Having worked exclusively with palliative patients in her previous job in Alberta, Larson knows how best to treat them from both a medical and social perspective. In Flin Flon, she has made it part of her mission to share her knowledge with the general-duty nurses and family physicians who care for terminal patients.w Since arriving at the hospital a year and a half ago, Larson says there has been considerable progress in enhancing palliative care locally. She is now working on improving palliative care across the Northern RHA. She was a central player in a conference on the topic, held this past weekend in Creighton, attended by 50-plus health-care providers. Brown, who took in the conference, says palliative care can go against the professional grain for nurses and doctors. 'We're educated to heal people and to make people better,' she says. 'It's a totally different mindset when you look at somebody and think, 'I can't make this person better, but I can give them a better quality of life for the rest of their life, whatever the time may be.' It's a different way of looking at things.' While palliative care is certainly not for all health-care providers, Larson says it can be rewarding. 'For myself, it's very fulfilling,' she says. 'It's always sad. You know eventually all of your patients are going to pass away, but it's what you're doing for them during that time (that matters). 'Obviously at some point we're all going to need palliative care. As we all know, the circle of life begins with birth and ends with death. These patients deserve the highest quality of care and that's what we're trying to educate people on.'
