Justin Michael Ingerman Center for Palliative Care

The Justin Michael Ingerman Center for Palliative Care helps support children with serious or complicated conditions and their families through clinical care, psychosocial support, research, and education. The goal of palliative care is to relieve pain and stress and meet the psychological, social and spiritual needs of your child and family.

The consulting team, known as the Pediatric Advanced Care Team (PACT), supports you by:

  • Facilitating communication between your child, the members of your family, and your child's healthcare providers
  • Helping you make decisions that best reflect your child's and your family's values and preferences
  • Improving your child's and your family's quality of life
  • Improving the management of symptoms that cause discomfort
  • Providing emotional, social, spiritual and bereavement support
  • Promoting continuity of care
  • Delivering effective educational programs to healthcare staff
  • Conducting research to better inform how we can best care for children with life-limiting conditions and support their families

In addition to pediatric palliative care, CHOP offers perinatal palliative care services for families dealing with the diagnosis of a life-threatening birth defect. This team will help you plan for and cope with the remainder of your pregnancy and the time around delivery.

Community outreach and advocacy

We believe the best system of pediatric palliative care spans the continuum from home and community care to hospital care and back.

We help coordinate the biannual Partners in Pediatric Care Program, a free education day that connects end-of-life care programs with community-based hospice and home-care agencies.. We also participate in other outreach and advocacy activities to help advance the quality of care for children living with life-threatening or life-limiting conditions.

For more information about the Partners in Pediatric Care Program, contact Gwenn LaRagione, RN, BSN.

Professional education

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia is one of seven hospitals nationwide participating in the Initiative for Pediatric Palliative Care, an education and quality improvement effort aimed at enhancing family-centered care for children living with life-threatening conditions.

Research

With funding from the National Institute of Nursing Research at the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and other sources, we conduct studies that focus on how hospitals can better support families facing difficult decisions about a child's care, and how regional systems of care could be better organized to provide palliative support care services to children and their families.

For more information about our research, contact Chris Feudtner, MD, PhD, MPH.