Outpatient Palliative Care

Abstract

Abstract Outpatient palliative care programs provide necessary and sustained linkage between care settings by building a partnership with patients and families throughout the disease trajectory. With transdisciplinary collaboration, outpatient palliative care teams intervene preemptively to anticipate, prevent, and treat distress for those with serious illness. Palliative social workers hold a necessary role on the outpatient palliative care team and are a bridge between the medical providers and patient to address psychosocial, emotional, and relational needs. Outpatient palliative care programs are diverse in structure but hold opportunities for further improvement in standardization of care, consistent service delivery, and accessing secure funding resources. Society is faced with an aging population and national healthcare crises, including socioeconomic pressures, pervasive healthcare disparities among cultural groups, global pandemics such as COVID-19, and evolving medical technology and pharmacology. As patients with serious illness learn to navigate their healthcare and are asked to make complex healthcare decisions, palliative social workers are needed more than ever to represent and facilitate personalized and systemic change in outpatient palliative care.