So the question of what is good supportive care? And what does it look like is an incredibly important question. And I think to be able to answer that question, well, we first have to fundamentally understand the experience of patients and their loved ones when that patient is diagnosed with a serious illness. And what we know is that unfortunately, patients irrespective of their serious illness diagnosis, whether it’s cancer or heart failure, end stage renal disease, they experience significant physical symptoms like pain, nausea, shortness of breath, which can have a significant impact on their quality of life and their illness journey.

But suffering in serious illness isn’t just physical. We also know that there’s a significant amount of psychosocial distress that occurs with serious illness and patients experience a significant amount of depression, anxiety, even existential and spiritual distress. And this impact isn’t just on the patient. We also know that caregiver burnout is a very real thing. And that has an impact not just on the caregiver, but also on the patient’s outcomes as well.

And so it’s easy to see how the physical issues the psychosocial issues, and the challenges of navigating our fragmented healthcare system can really create this total suffering experience that patients with serious illness go through, in addition, with their loved ones.

Now the good thing is that high quality supportive care can address all of these issues as a supportive care clinician, and there’s an understanding that no one person can tend to all of these needs and as such, we work with interdisciplinary teams of nurses, social workers, chaplains to really address all of these domains, from the physical to the emotional to the psychosocial to the spiritual.

We also work in lockstep with the patient’s primary care clinicians and their specialists to really add a secondary layer of support so it’s synergistic layer of support hat works with that patient’s disease directed treatment in a seamless way. We also spend a lot of time working with patients’ loved ones to really understand what matters to them, particularly as they get sicker so that as they get sicker, they can make the best decisions for them and their loved ones in keeping with their goals and values, what matters most.

We also know that we can provide this type of care in the home and do it well. We know that patients want to be in home and if we can provide this care well it helps them stay in their home. And lastly, we also know this type of care when delivered early in an illness and not waiting until the very last stages can have even greater benefits for that patient and loved ones.