Palliative Care: Quality of Life… Not End of Life

Boy did I learn a lot on this show! First thing that came to my mind when I thought “Palliative Care” was hospice and the end-stage of life. Today, Ramya Sampath, physician-in-training at The University Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, taught me that it is so much more than that! Palliative care is a comprehensive model of patient-centered medicine that takes into consideration many factors of a patient’s well being such as their overall health, socioeconomic status, access to medications, cultural background, and more. It’s not just keeping someone comfortable at the end of their life, but improving their quality of life. Ramya speaks to us today about her personal story of how she got into this field of medicine and how important it is to incorporate aspects of palliative care within many disciplines and throughout the lifespan. Ramya is a former Fulbright-Nehru Fellow at Pallium India from 2017-2018, where she conducted ethnographic fieldwork exploring Kerala's unique approach to palliative care delivery. She became interested in palliative care after seeing her father's quality of life decline from several chronic medical conditions and witnessing the incredible work that palliative care practitioners do to improve patients' and families' lives across a wide variety of diseases and settings. Read about her experiences with palliative care as a researcher and family caregiver here: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2773566Read the piece that inspired this interview: “Always More To Be Done” by Ramya Sampath.