Palliative Care Deserves Physicians' Attention

"The patients want to keep that hope," he says. "The doctors want to just do what they do and that's how they make their living, so they are happy when a patient says, ‘I want you to do something. I want to pretend I'm not dying.' So stuff gets done."

Other physicians may not endorse palliative care, or even hospice care, because they wrongly feel those programs may reflect poorly on their own work, healthcare leaders tell me. Some doctors may see those programs as symbolic that they have given up hope, that all those procedures, all the plans for their patients, were for naught. That's too bad.

At the Breakthroughs session, panel member Johnson raised the point that physicians "feel like it's a failure" to have such discussions involving palliative or end of life care. That shouldn't be the case, he says. "We have to be willing to follow-up what the patients' goals are," Johnson says.

"Because what I've seen too frequently is the patient will have stated their goals of care and then somewhere that gets overwritten. And we see the 94-year-old patient that didn't' want anything who is on on a ventilator for a month. And that's a very sad thing."