Palliative care at Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital
Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana, provides palliative and hospice care for children and their families. This care provides an extra layer of support for children facing a chronic and complex or life-threatening illness. We provide perinatal palliative care for families expecting a baby with a life-threatening diagnosis. Our experienced, interdisciplinary team includes a Hospice and Palliative Medicine board-certified physician, a nurse practitioner, nurses, social workers, healing arts therapists, chaplains and child life specialists. Your child’s care team helps manage symptoms, including pain, anxiety, constipation or fatigue to support you in complex, value-based medical decisions, and provides emotional and spiritual support for your child and family.
Pediatric palliative care for children and their families
Palliative care can help children and families at any stage of a serious illness. Your palliative care team works with your child’s pediatrician and other specialists – meaning your child can receive palliative care alongside other treatments. To help ease pain and symptoms, your child can start receiving palliative care as soon as your child is diagnosed with a serious illness. Carrying the burden of a serious illness is challenging in many ways; the palliative care team helps families face challenging topics like how to support siblings, discussing prognosis and thinking through complex treatment decisions.
Find out more about how other parents find pediatric palliative care helpful.
Our team provides support to give your child and family more good days. This includes:
- Emotional and spiritual support for your child and family
- Help communicating goals and wishes with your care team
- Interdisciplinary care from child life specialists, healing arts therapists, chaplains, and social workers
- Memory making and legacy building with your child
- Pain and symptom management
- Phone, face-to-face and virtual (telehealth) visits with palliative care specialists
- Transition care from hospital to home and from childhood to adulthood
Common conditions appropriate for palliative care include:
- Cancer (various types such as leukemia, brain tumors and neuroblastoma)
- Cardiovascular disorders (for example, heart failure and congenital heart disease)
- Chronic respiratory conditions (for example, cystic fibrosis, severe bronchopulmonary dysplasia and repeated pulmonary infections)
- Gastrointestinal disorders (severe short bowel syndrome)
- Genetic and congenital disorders (for example, trisomy 18, trisomy 13 and congenital heart defects)
- Immune system disorders (severe combined immunodeficiency)
- Metabolic disorders (for example, mitochondrial diseases and lysosomal storage disorders)
- Neurological disorders (for example, cerebral palsy, severe epilepsy and muscular dystrophies)
- Perinatal conditions (complications of prematurity)
- Progressive neuromuscular disorders (spinal muscular atrophy)
- Renal (kidney) diseases (end-stage renal disease)
- Stroke (in pediatric patients, often related to congenital conditions)
- Traumatic brain injury
Still not sure if palliative care is right for your child? Consider answering these 5 simple questions.
Perinatal palliative care for babies and their families
If your baby is diagnosed with a life-threatening medical condition during pregnancy, our perinatal palliative care team members are here to support you and your family through this difficult time. We provide telephone appointments and hospital visits before, during and after delivery.
Perinatal palliative care includes:
- Bereavement care
- Birth planning
- Emotional and spiritual support for you and your family
- Help communicating goals and wishes to your care team
- Help from a nurse navigator who coordinates your care
- Legacy building and memory making before and after delivery
Hospice care for children and their families
The goal of hospice is to live well with a good quality of life by helping your child feel as comfortable as possible even when an illness becomes life-threatening and is in the end stages. The palliative care team at Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital partners with local hospice teams to provide support and care in your home or wherever your child resides. We are able to provide this level of support when a doctor is concerned that death might occur within the next six months. Your child’s hospice care team focuses on easing pain and stress and reducing symptoms related to their illness.
Your family’s hospice care plan may include:
- 24/7 on-call support from a hospice nurse
- 24/7 at-home visits
- Bereavement care
- Emotional and spiritual support for your child and family
- Home delivery of medications and medical equipment
- Legacy building and memory making
- Pain and symptom management
- Sibling support from a child life specialist
- Transition care from hospital to home