Palliative Care Services

Our Pediatric Advanced Care Team (PACT) begins work when a provider diagnoses a child with a serious illness. Because every child and family is different, we treat each child as an individual, tailoring our services to meet the specific needs of each child and family.

We continue to work with the child, family and care team throughout the patient’s illness and treatment.

Our team collaborates with other healthcare professionals at Children’s, including medical teams, child life and chaplaincy to provide holistic, interdisciplinary care.

Our Pediatric Advanced Care Team (PACT) is trained to listen, assess and find innovative ways to make life as good as possible for each child. We partner and collaborate with pediatric specialists across a variety of clinical services.

We aim to:

• Help children and families identify, prevent and treat stress and symptoms across every stage of disease
• Limit a child’s suffering and improve their quality of life, despite the effects of their disease
• Explore the hopes of our children and their families in order to set realistic goals for care
• Partner with community programs and identify resources for children and families
• Work closely with our children, their families and the medical teams that care for them
• Support programs in training, policy, research, clinical guidelines and advocacy

We help children and families manage:

• Physical symptoms
• Psycho-social challenges 
• Spiritual challenges

• Family support
• Team support
• Community support

In 2011, Children’s introduced pediatric palliative care services to help improve the quality of life of children with serious and life-threatening conditions. Our Pediatric Advanced Care Team (PACT) helps patients deal with the stress and symptoms at every stage of serious illness.

PACT provides research, community outreach, educational assistance and oversight of clinical and public policy. While palliative care alone cannot bridge the gaps in care that exist for patients with serious and life threatening conditions, we share our knowledge with outside providers so that we can make a difference for children throughout the region.

Children's is able to help provide the most up-to-date care for our patients and develop new programs like PACT due to the generous support of our donors. To support PACT, contact Katie Miller at 404-785-7346.

• Center to Advance Palliative Care: What is Pediatric Palliative Care?
• Pediatric Palliative Care: Article on the Children's palliative care program by Program Director Jeffery C. Klick, M.D., and Meghan Tracewski, C.P.N.P.
• Courageous Parents Network: Helping parents and providers get families through serious pediatric illness.
• FOCUS: Offering comfort, hope, and fun to families with children who are medically fragile or have significant developmental or physical disabilities.
• American Academy of Pediatrics: Section on Hospice and Palliative Medicine