Palliative Care

Our goal is to make your child as comfortable as possible and to have the best quality of life possible. We do that by providing your child with:

• Pain and symptom management
• Care planning and goal setting
• Religious and spiritual support
• Opportunities to create memories
• Support for sisters and brothers
• Coordinated care with primary care providers
• Grief and bereavement services

Palliative care helps strengthen your child’s body, mind and spirit when they experience symptoms that come with a serious illness. Easing these symptoms:

• Helps provide the best possible quality of life for your child
• Makes your child better able to handle medical treatments
• Helps family members cope with the feelings and emotions of having a sick child

• Constipation
• Fear, anxiety, stress
• Loss of appetite
• Nausea and vomiting
• Pain
• Problems with sleep
• Shortness of breath
• Tiredness

The HSC Butterfly Team is a group of professional experts in pediatric palliative care. Members work together with the child, family, and their unit-based care team to make sure that the child and family have the best quality of life possible. This includes making every effort to provide surroundings that create a climate of sensitivity, privacy and comfort for the child and family.

• Care planning and goal setting 
• Collaboration with primary providers
• Grief and bereavement services
• Integrative therapies
• Memory and legacy making
• Pain and symptom management
• Spiritual and emotional support
• Support for the whole family including siblings

To provide active and holistic care for children and young people and their families experiencing a life-limiting illness in a supportive environment that focuses on enhancement of quality of life, family support, and management of distressing symptoms while respecting their beliefs, values, and priorities.

This is a program for children who are already patients at The HSC Pediatric Center. To learn more about this inpatient program, please call our admission office at 202-635-6115, or visit our how to get services page.