Palliative Care Program
Creating opportunities for hope
To make an appointment, call (414) 266-6469 or toll-free (866) 416-1510.
The Palliative Care Program at Children's Hospital is one of the nation's leaders providing state-of-the-art treatment for children with complex or life-threatening conditions and their families.
Palliative care is medical care that focuses on treating the pain, symptoms and stress of children and families facing complex or
life-threatening conditions. It is not just caring for dying children. We provide palliative care along with any other treatment children receive, so they can remain comfortable at any stage of illness. We stay with families every step of the way to ensure their child is getting the care he or she deserves.
Services
Whether in the hospital or at home, we work with the child, family and existing health-care team to:
- Improve the child's quality of life and help him or her live life to the fullest.
- Provide round-the-clock access to staff that can answer any questions about a child's well-being or treatment.
- Help coordinate the child's medical care, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
- Empower the child and family with choices and control over health care and help make complex medical decisions.
 Coordinate home health services and home visitation, as needed.
- Attend to suffering and provide expert pain and symptom control.
- Promote hope and dignity.
- Develop connections to school and community resources.
- Be available for phone consultation.
- Care for the whole family by listening, respecting their beliefs and recognizing each family and child is different.
- Offer educational sessions and lectures on topics such as symptom management, exploring life meaning, advance care planning, communicating with children and families about their illness, and ethics.
- Engage experts in child life, psychology, social services, spiritual care, occupational therapy, physical therapy, nutrition and others as needed.
Palliative care staff often is involved during extended illnesses such as severe disability or progressive conditions, when curative treatment is possible but may fail, or when premature death may be anticipated.
Some of the diagnoses or conditions include:
 Advanced or progressive cancer.
- Complex and severe congenital and acquired heart disease.
- HIV.
- Cystic fibrosis.
- Severe gastrointestinal disorders or malformations such as midgut volvulus or severe congenital diaphragmatic hernia.
- Severe epidermolysis bullosa.
- Severe immunodeficiencies.
- Renal failure when dialysis and/or transplantation are not available.
- Chronic or severe respiratory failure.
- Muscular dystrophy.
- Mucupolysaccharidoses or other storage disorders.
- Progressive metabolic disorders.
- Certain chromosomal abnormalities.
- Severe forms of osteogenesis imperfecta.
- Cerebral palsy with recurrent infection or difficult symptoms.
- Extreme prematurity.
- Severe neurologic sequelae of infectious disease.
- Hypoxic/anoxic brain injury.
- Holoprosencephaly or other severe brain malformations.
Research
We conduct ongoing research to continually improve the care we provide children and families. Current studies include:
- Development of an instrument to measure parental efficacy in pediatric palliative care.
- Rapid-cycle quality improvement in pediatric palliative care education.
- Assessing quality of life in children with cancer confronting advanced disease.
- Pediatric advanced illness care coordination.
- Symptom control trials.
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