Palliative Care

Pediatric palliative care is an interdisciplinary approach to supporting children and families facing life-threatening or life-limiting illness, regardless of stage or prognosis. Palliative care focuses on improving quality of life and ensuring that clinical care aligns with the goals and values of the patients and their families. While our expertise includes providing comfort at end-of-life, most often we provide care concurrent with disease-directed therapy, collaborating with the patient’s primary medical team to ensure clear communication and alignment of goals and interventions.

Pediatric palliative care may mean help with challenging symptom management, help navigating difficult decision-making, or just thinking about how to ensure that a child with complex needs gets the best care possible. Our aim is to explore patient and family hopes, fears, and values in an ongoing manner in order to keep their goals of care at the center of decision-making, especially in the setting of complex medical issues with uncertain prognoses."

Natalia Henner, MD
Interim Division Head, Palliative Care

What We Do

Education

The Division of Palliative Care offers a one-year, ACGME-accredited clinical fellowship in hospice and palliative medicine, co-sponsored by the Hospice and Palliative Care program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. In addition, the division offers clinical electives in palliative care for Lurie Children’s pediatric residents, fellows in other pediatric subspecialties and Feinberg medical students. Division members also provide didactic conferences for pediatrics residents and for Lurie Children’s staff members in a variety of clinical professions.

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Patient Care

The division's clinical team, comprised of attending physicians, advanced practice nurses, and a nurse coordinator, provides inpatient and outpatient consultative services in symptom management and guidance and support for complex medical decision making and goals of care in the setting of life-limiting illness. Faculty consists of palliative care physicians as well as physicians who practice palliative care in other specialties such as hematology/oncology/stem cell transplantation, pediatric critical care, and neonatology. The clinical team partners with other Lurie programs including social work and psychology, chaplaincy, child life, creative arts therapists, Heartlight (Lurie’s bereavement program), ParentWise, and others to provide multidisciplinary care.

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Research

Our faculty participate in research related to many issues around palliative care including:

Family involvement in decision making, especially regarding end-of-life care in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit
Ethical issues arising from the care of children with a variety of medical conditions
Parents’ use of social media to chronicle their experience with critically ill infants and children
Integration of palliative care into the care of children with advanced cancer

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Advocacy

Members of the division participate actively in local, state, regional and international efforts to improve patient and family access to expert pediatric palliative care, including with refugees, in the developing world and for underserved populations in the United States. In addition, faculty members are actively engaged with and hold or have held leadership positions in several national organizations, including the American Association for Hospice and Palliative Medicine, the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

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Meet the Team

Faculty

EXPLORE OUR FACULTY PROFILES

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Your support is important in helping us continue to make a difference in the lives of patients and families.

Our hospital and research center relies on philanthropic funding to enhance its programs, services and research for children. To learn more, please contact the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago Foundation at foundation@luriechildrens.org or call 312-227-7500.

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