Story Posted: 2024-07-16
Hospital Highlights 2023-24: End-of-Life Care
From the St. Paul’s Hospital & SPH Foundation 2023-24 Annual Review.
St. Paul’s Hospital has been leading end-of-life care in Saskatoon since the opening of the city’s first Palliative Care Unit at the Hospital in 1990. For as long as we have held Palliative Care as a leadership area, we have been providing compassionate care to patients and their loved ones, serving them in a manner that addresses the social, emotional, physical, cognitive and spiritual needs of people receiving care at end of life.
St. Paul’s Hospital’s Palliative Care Unit
Palliative Care Services at St. Paul’s Hospital works as a holistic team of specialists to provide support to patients and their loved ones as they receive end-of-life care. Our holistic care approach endeavors to address the needs of the patient while honoring the whole person, rather than only their diagnosis. We partner with other units within our Hospital to serve patients who face life-limiting illness, and work alongside the Hospice at Glengarda and other palliative care services in the community.
In the past year, we had the opportunity to build on the welcoming environment in our Unit and plan for the future by refreshing patient rooms with significant support from St. Paul’s Hospital Foundation. We trialed new beds and settled on a top-of-the-line model for each patient’s room. The Art Cart continues to travel the Unit, offering patients the opportunity to select artwork of their choice for their rooms. We also added new sleep beds and furniture for family use, a “tickle trunk” for children who come to visit loved ones, and added a fresh coat of paint to our patient rooms and our hallways. As well, the addition of new storage, renovation of the family kitchen and revitalization of our volunteer program are in the works. These family and community spaces are integral to those who visit our Unit, and allow for loved ones to spend quality time with patients as well as with one another. This past year, we even hosted a wedding in our Family Room.
We continue to offer holistic programming to patients and families, with full-time Music Therapy coverage now offered on the Unit. Our Palliative Care music therapists do wonderful and important work, facilitating legacy projects such as producing heartbeat recordings of patients that can be overlaid with a patient’s favourite song or recording of choice. This year, the Healing Arts Team collaborated to extend the invitation for the Take 5 Music Club to the families of patients staying in Palliative Care. Family members also can access the mobile art workshop when it is offered on the 5th floor common area by our Artist-in-Residence.
Your Support Provides Comfort in our Community
The Palliative Care Unit is deeply thankful for community support that has not only contributed to our Unit renovations, but also allowed us to purchase items that bring home-like touches to our space such as a fireplace and fresh décor, games and puzzles for our Family Room, a Memory Tree at Christmas, and mini-fridges for each patient’s room. Additionally, we were able to enhance the safety of supported patient transfers with the purchase of a “Sara Steady” lift. Donors’ generosity has also ensured the continuation of our Comfort Care Cart, with food items and beverages served to families by volunteers.
Community donations created the Hospice and Palliative Care Education Fund to support training and education for end-of-life caregivers, and advanced important endowments to support holistic palliative care staffing and programming at St. Paul’s Hospital, the Hospice at Glengarda, and in the surrounding community. In 2023, several staff attended the “Physical and Emotional Suffering at End-of-Life” conference in Saskatoon, as well as LEAP™ core training, which builds essential competencies to provide a palliative care approach.