Imagine you or someone you love is diagnosed with a serious illness. Cancer, perhaps, or heart failure. Along with the physical toll, you might feel overwhelmed by the appointments, treatment details and rapid-fire decisions you’re asked to make. Now imagine that from day one, you had a specialized team to support you — mentally, physically, and even spiritually if you needed it. That’s the role of palliative care. This specialty has been around for 20 years, but it’s often misunderstood and underused.

In many ways, palliative care represents the ideal of whole-person, patient-centered health care, says Peggy Maguire, president of Cambia Health Foundation. As leader of the Cambia Health Foundation, in the last decade Maguire has shepherded about $65 million toward palliative care access, awareness and quality programs. One of the most impactful of these investments is the Sojourns Scholar Leadership Program. Other Foundation initiatives include grants for home, community-based and hospital-based palliative care units, as well as seed funding for telehealth programs and consumer awareness campaigns like CAPC’s "Get Palliative Care" and the Netflix documentary "End Game." The Foundation also was the initial funder of The Conversation Project and co-funded the Serious Illness Messaging Toolkit. 

The goal is for every person who could benefit from palliative care to know what it is, how to ask for it, and to get it from a skilled team in the setting that is right for them.

“By growing the field of palliative care, we also hope to influence broader transformation,” Maguire says. “The aim is to create a health care system that is more person-focused, compassionate, and healing in the broadest sense of the word, not just in fighting disease.”