Vision

The Center for Palliative Care serves patients and families experiencing life-threatening or advanced illness by providing compassionate clinical care, providing leadership in teaching health professionals and trainees, conducting collaborative research, and influencing health care delivery and public policy.

Definition of Palliative Care

Palliative care is a comprehensive approach to caring for people with advanced or life-threatening illness. This specialty is directed at supportive management of patients and their loved ones with a focus on relief of physical, social, emotional, or spiritual suffering. The Center provides palliative and supportive care for cancer patients on therapy, for long term cancer survivors, and for individuals experiencing other life-threatening or life limiting illnesses.

Center Research

The Center’s research mission focuses on innovations that improve the range of interventions and services available to those in need of palliative care. Research priorities include symptom assessment and control, chronic illness care, survivorship, supportive care, nutrition support, quality of life in advanced and terminal illness, end-of-life outcomes measurement, distress among caregivers, bereavement care, and ethnic/racial and cultural disparities in end-of-life care.

Clinical and Training Activities

Clinical services include inpatient, ambulatory and consultative palliative medicine, both at University Hospital and the Birmingham VA Medical Center. Ambulatory services include the UAB Palliative Care Clinic, the UAB Supportive Care Clinic, and the UAB HIV Palliative Care Clinic. At University Hospital, palliative care faculty provides inpatient care at the Palliative and Comfort Care Unit. At the Birmingham VA Medical Center, palliative care faculty provides inpatient care at the Safe Harbor Unit, hospice coordination, and home-based palliative care. The Center maintains collaborative relationships with hospice care programs in the community. It also sponsors the UAB Palliative Medicine Fellowship Training Program, with positions for three new fellows per year. One-year clinical and two-to-three year academic/research training tracks are available to incoming fellows.

For additional information, please contact:

Director: Christine S. Ritchie, MD, MSPH

Email: critchie@uab.edu

Phone: 205-975-8197

Approved by: Christine S. Ritchie, MD, MSPH, Director

Date: April 21, 2008

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