“The idea of early palliative care was really a prevention strategy for preventing people from going through unnecessary and unwanted suffering, treatments, and things that were not consistent with their values and preferences. . . . For people who have a serious illness, it’s not good to wait until you’re facing these very critical decisions. You need to plan up-front,” ONS member Marie Bakitas, DNS, APRN, FAAN, AOCN®, professor and associate dean for research and scholarship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told Jaime Weimer, MSN, RN, AGCNS-BC, AOCNS®, oncology clinical specialist at ONS, during a conversation about implementing palliative and supportive care for patients with cancer. You can earn free NCPD contact hours after listening to this episode and completing the evaluation linked below. Music Credit: “Fireflies and Stardust” by Kevin MacLeod Licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 3.0 Earn 0.75 contact hours of nursing continuing professional development (NCPD) by listening to the full recording and completing an evaluation at myoutcomes.ons.org by March 17, 2025. The planners and faculty for this episode have no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies to disclose. ONS is accredited as a provider of NCPD by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on Accreditation. Learning outcome: The learner will report an increase in knowledge related to palliative care for patients with cancer. Episode Notes: Complete this evaluation for free NCPD. Oncology Nursing Podcast episodes: Episode 41: Advocating for Palliative Care and Hospice Education Episode 135: ELNEC Has Trained More Than One Million Nurses in End-of-Life Care Episode 204: How Radiation Is Used in Palliative Care ONS Voice articles: APRNs Can lead by Example When Integrating Palliative Care in Practice Managing COVID-19 and Cancer Requires Enhanced Palliative Care Skills ELNEC Milestone Marks Transformation of EOL Care for Countless Patients With Cancer Palliative care topic tag ONS Position Statement on Palliative Care for People With Cancer Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing article: Clinical Oncology Nurse Best Practices: Palliative Care and End-of-Life Conversations Palliative and Supportive Care articles: The Project ENABLE II Randomized Controlled Trial to Improve Palliative Care for Rural Patients With Advanced Cancer: Baseline Findings, Methodological Challenges, and Solutions Developing a “Toolkit” to Measure Implementation of Concurrent Palliative Care in Rural Community Cancer Centers Journal of the American Medical Association article: Effects of a Palliative Care Intervention on Clinical Outcomes in Patients With Advanced Cancer New England Journal of Medicine article: Early Palliative Care for Patients With Metastatic Non–Small-Cell Lung Cancer Book: Charting Your Course: A Life-Long Guide to Health and Compassion End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium American Society of Clinical Oncology: Palliative Care in Oncology Resources To discuss the information in this episode with other oncology nurses, visit the ONS Communities. To provide feedback or otherwise reach ONS about the podcast, email pubONSVoice@ons.org. Highlights From Today’s Episode “Now we think of palliative care as really the umbrella—it’s a medical specialty, it’s a nursing specialty field that you can get certified in. And hospice and comfort care are a subset of palliative care. Think of palliative care as the umbrella, and then toward the very end of life, hospice care—which is often guided by a very limited prognosis time frame of six months or less—and then within hospice care, comfort care is that care that is provided typically at the very end of life.” Timestamp (TS) 03:13 “For us, the idea of early palliative care was really a prevention strategy for preventing people from going through unnecessary and unwanted suffering, treatments, and things that were not consistent with their values and preferen