Learn more about the life-changing work of our palliative care teams

Palliative care is specialized medical care for people living with serious illness with a focus on providing relief from the symptoms and stress of the illness with the goal to improve quality of life for both the patient and the family.

Palliative care is focused on the needs of the patient, not on the prognosis. It is appropriate at any age and at any stage in a serious illness and it can be provided along with curative treatment.

UTSW provides palliative care through a team of specially-trained doctors, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, clinical social workers, chaplains, pharmacists, and others who work together with a patient’s other doctors to provide an extra layer of support. We provide a consultation service at Clements University Hospital and Parkland, as well as outpatient palliative care within clinics at the Simmons Cancer Center and Parkland.  Together, these programs served 3,024 patients over the last year.  

Next week, our Palliative Care team is hosting a series of events to help you learn more.

We also want to recognize our outstanding palliative care teams at UTSW and partners at Parkland, who earned gold and bronze in the second Tipping Point Challenge, an innovation and quality improvement competition from the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) and The John A. Hartford Foundation. According to the organizers: “This round of the challenge focused on innovation that has made or will make positive, breakthrough change in the care of a high-need patient population – those with serious illness.”

Our teams placed in these categories:

• Texting to Find the Tipping Point (Gold Winner, Planning Stage), submitted by Mary Elizabeth Paulk, M.D. Find out how (and why) this innovative project uses text messaging to be proactive about ambulatory patients to be able to intervene before a crisis occurs.
• Mass Production of Compassionate Communication in the Era of COVID-19 (Bronze Winner), submitted by Padmaja Reddy, M.D., and Anna Tomlinson, D.N.P., APRN. Find out more about their submission on the CAPC website.

The challenge was open to all health care organizations, settings, disciplines, and specialties across the U.S., and more than 100 initiatives were submitted. Each was evaluated based on five criteria: impact, evidence-base, feasibility, scalability, and sustainability.