Palliative Care, Grief and Loss

What is Palliative Care?

Palliative Care is often misunderstood and regarded with fear. Many in the community think of it as a ‘death sentence” and certainly people referred to palliative care services are living with an illness that will impact on their life expectancy, however palliative care is not about a diagnosis… it is about choice.

Palliative care is about “Specialist health care and practical support” and aims to provide people with the best possible treatment options, assistance with pain and symptom management, access to specialist health care professionals, ability to choose the site of their care (wether that be hospital or home), practical psychological, emotional and social support and information.

Palliative care is specialised healthcare by experts with training and experience in supporting terminally ill patients and their families, and includes the provision of pain management either in the home or in a hospital setting. It can also offer a wide range of specialist health services including counselling and pastoral care.

Palliative care can begin from the first diagnosis of a terminal illness (even if the person is having ACTIVE treatment) and offers practical support; from organising appointments to the management of medications. It’s about doing the best for a loved one when help is needed.

Palliative care is a health service funded by the Victorian Government thru the Department of Human Services and is delivered thru local networks and is a free community service. You can access your local Palliative care provider via the Department of Human Services link on the links page of this website.

Palliative Care Victoria is the peak body of palliative care providers in Victoria and offers a range of community education and information services. You can access Palliative Care Victoria via the link on the links page of this website.

What is Grief and Loss?

How we define Loss varies from person to person. But a loss usually means:
•Being deprived of something/ someone we value
•Having something we value (or a component of something we value) taken away from us
•Failure to keep or protect something we value.

The loss is the event. Grief is the reaction to the loss.

There are many loss events that can cause a grief reaction and these will vary from person to person. The common loss events that cause us to grieve include:
•Death of a person we love
•Loss of a limb (arm, leg, breast etc.) and may be due to amputation or loss of the function of the limb (as often happens when a person has a ‘stroke’)
•Health (as happens in chronic illness)
•Career or Job (being made redundant or being retrenched)
•Relationships (eg. divorce, separation, relationship breakdown)
•Role (eg. when someone has been a carer and the person for whom they were caring dies or when children grow up and ‘mothering’ or ‘fathering’ changes)
•Faith or belief (eg. when someone becomes disillusioned with a belief they have held for a long time)
•Youth (eg. in old age)
•Home or country (eg. due to poverty, war, elderly moving to a Nursing Home)
•Opportunity

Of course this list is only select examples. People will grieve over any loss that is significant to them, that is why we should never judge the relevance of someone else’s grief experience because we DON'T KNOW how much they had invested in the thing that has been taken from them.

“Normal Grief”
There is really no such thing as ‘normal grief’. Grief is unique and subjective process, which means everyone’s experience will be different and that grief experiences will vary according to the loss. For example a person will experience grief due to a death differently to the grief they experience when they are sacked from their job.

Grief is, however a ‘normal’ process which means that it is not a mental illness, nor is it ‘unhealthy’. How people express their grief will vary from person to person, experience to experience. Some people may be sad and cry a lot, others may feel melancholy and withdraw from their usual activities for a while, still others may feel angry or guilty and have difficulty communicating with others. There is no set pattern of expressing grief, therefore if we are supporting a grieving person we should not expect them to cry, withdraw or display anxiety, they will respond in the way that’s right for them which may include tears and anger, but may not.

The experience of grief will vary from day to day as the person comes to terms with the reality of the loss (ie. struggles to realise that their loss is real and that they havn’t just imagined it) and attempts to make some meaning of their experience.

How a person responds to a significant grief experience has multiple personal, social, cultural and experiential influences.