Palliative Care

Overview

Living with a serious illness that limits one's life is an immensely challenging experience. Strong Memorial Hospital's UR Medicine Palliative Care Division has been providing assistance to thousands of seriously ill patients and their families since 1999, helping them improve their quality of life and overall well-being.

Our team of experts helps people with serious illness live their best life possible by:

Treating the physical, emotional, and spiritual challenges of serious illness.
Exploring and understanding each person’s unique priorities, hopes, worries, and preferences, to ensure that their treatment plan honors their values.
Providing support to patients and their loved ones throughout the course of serious illness, through its ups and downs, sometimes through the end of life.

Learn about our residency and fellowship programs.

Education & Training Programs

UR Medicine's Approach

What is Palliative Care?

Palliative Care is specialized medical care provided by an interdisciplinary team who:

Treat the physical, emotional, and spiritual challenges of serious illness.
Explore each person’s unique priorities, hopes, worries, and preferences, to ensure that their treatment plan honors their values.
Provide support to patients and their loved ones throughout the course of living with serious illness.

Palliative Care is available to patients of all ages and through all stages of serious illness: from diagnosis, through the ups and downs of disease-directed and potentially curative care, and sometimes through the end of life.

What is Hospice Care?

Hospice Care is a type of Palliative Care that is specifically designed for people who are nearing the end of their lives and are no longer receiving disease-directed treatments. While Hospice Care is a form of Palliative Care, it is not the same as Palliative Care. The Palliative Care team, along with the Hospice team, provides Hospice Care when an eligible patient chooses this plan.

What Sets Us Apart?

Innovative Research

The University of Rochester Palliative Care Research Center is committed to creating and testing innovative methods to enhance the well-being of individuals living with serious illnesses, their families, and healthcare providers through the application of palliative and supportive care. The University of Rochester boasts a long-standing history of implementing palliative care and other patient-centered care models. Our Center's members and faculty hail from various schools and departments throughout the University. We view clinical advancement as a crucial motivator of research and seek to collaborate with healthcare providers who possess excellent concepts and are seeking to put them to the test. We endorse inclusivity, transparency, and the pursuit of ambitious goals to make the world a better place.

We Embody a Culture of Excellence

Our certification in Advanced Palliative Care from The Joint Commission—the gold standard in health care—means that our program voluntarily undergoes a thorough independent evaluation by trained experts in the field every other year.

Confirming Our Care Delivery

The goal of the voluntary evaluation by The Joint Commission? To assess if we meet rigorous performance and continuous compliance standards for delivering exceptional patient-and- family-centered palliative care. We have continuously met these standards since the inception of the certification process in 2011—we were the very first academic medical center to achieve Advanced Certification in Palliative Care. Our facility is honored to hold the Joint Commission Gold Seal of Approval®—an internationally recognized symbol of quality. Our program is modeled on the Clinical Practice Guidelines for Quality Palliative Care, 4th edition and strives to constantly improve our processes of care and care outcomes through our focus on quality improvement.

Our achievement confirms that we offer:

A formal, organized inpatient program led by an interdisciplinary team with expertise in palliative care
A special focus on patient and family engagement
Processes that support the coordination of care and communication among all care settings and providers