Practical issues in palliative and quality-of-life care.

Although palliative care is not new to health care or to oncology, oncologists still struggle to maximize the value of this type of care across the entire care continuum and across the patient's trajectory of illness. When we don't use what may be the best tools for the job, at the right times in the care path, we miss opportunities to optimize patient and family coping, to limit suffering, and to ensure that our care plans are patient centered. In this article, we look at how we define palliative care and how the tools of palliative medicine can be used to enhance patient care in the outpatient oncology practice setting.