The mission of the BMG Palliative Medicine is to provide relief of suffering and integration of hope into the lives of patients and families living with or dying from life-limiting illness. We do this through cutting-edge physical, emotional, and spiritual care with the goal of improving quality of life for patients and families.
By incorporating physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses, licensed clinical social workers, and chaplains into an interdisciplinary team, palliative care addresses the whole patient physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Our services can be received at any stage of the disease process in conjunction with curative or life-prolonging treatments.
BMG Palliative Medicine provides comprehensive inpatient palliative care consultation and follow up encounters at Baptist Memorial Hospital, Memphis, with plans to expand to multiple hospitals within the Baptist System. Consultation and ongoing visits can include complex symptom management, patient and family centered discussions concerning treatment options filtered through patients’ priorities, goals, and hopes. We also provide advance care planning, and multispecialty care coordination. BMG Palliative Medicine works closely with the advanced heart failure, oncology, and pulmonary/critical care service lines and sees these patients and any others in all areas of the hospital. The Inpatient Palliative Care Consult Service can be reached by calling (901) 226-2800.
BMG Palliative Medicine also works in collaboration to provide home palliative care services through the Baptist Trinity Home Palliative Care Program in a partnership with Baptist Memorial Health Care and LHC Group. The palliative home program works in collaboration with patients’ primary care physicians and specialty care team to assist with complex symptom management, advance care planning, and ongoing goals of care as patients seek to maximize quality of life for themselves and their families in the midst of serious illness. The Baptist Trinity Home Palliative Care Program can be reached by calling (901) 343-8100.
Education is a key priority for the BMG Palliative Medicine Service. The service currently participates in the training of Palliative Medicine Fellows as well as fellows from geriatrics and addiction medicine, residents from family medicine, internal medicine, and emergency medicine, and nurse practitioners and nurses. Palliative Care team members currently participate in multiple interdisciplinary care committees with the purpose of integrating palliative care principles and enhancing the level of palliative care knowledge for all providers in the hospital and eventually, the entire organization. The BMG Palliative Medicine Service seeks to maintain patient and family centered compassionate and excellent care while also serving as a training hub of palliative care for the Baptist System in hopes of providing ongoing and expanded palliative services for the community that are inclusive, accessible, and comprehensive.
