HMH - Pediatric Pain and Palliative Care - Hackensack

Our practice, part of Hackensack Meridian Health Medical Group and Hackensack University Medical Center, is staffed by a team of interdisciplinary clinicians who work together with your child’s doctors to provide an extra layer of support to children and their families who are diagnosed with life-limiting and life-threatening illnesses. These specialists and other health care professionals with different areas of expertise come together as a team, thinking and acting across boundaries to improve quality of life. Blending palliative care with curative treatment is essential in providing your child and family with the most complete medical care possible. This makes palliative care unique.

Palliative Care

The goals of palliative care are to relieve symptoms and improve quality of life for patients with serious or advanced illness. Depending on the patient’s needs, palliative care can be given along with curative treatments. The treatment plan is based on each child’s individual needs and:

• Seeks to enhance quality of life
• Helps families pursue comfort-oriented goals concurrently with cure-directed therapy
• Manages a child’s pain and other symptoms so he or she is comfortable, but not asleep or unconscious
• Involves talking openly with family about a child’s prognosis and treatment side effects so families can make tough, but informed, decisions
• Optimizes achievement of goals and potential for children on a complex medical journey

Community Outreach

We believe the best system of palliative care spans the continuum from home and community to hospital care and back.  We help coordinate palliative care in the home setting with community-based hospice and home-care agencies.

Professional Certification

We are one of the only children’s hospitals in the New Jersey which has a pediatric program which has a JCAHO palliative care certification.

Our Services

Our team sees children for inpatients for inpatient consults, or outpatient clinic visits. During the consultation, we evaluate your child’s health and feelings, your family’s needs and your care team’s medical plan in order to formulate recommendations. We are available to discuss communication with you primary team, pain and symptom issues, hospice and home care,  psychological/spiritual stressors and care coordination.