Dr. Jonathan Abrams is a home-care physician for the Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care, located in Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Prior to working at Mount Sinai, Dr. Abrams spent two years doing a fellowship at the Pain and Palliative Care Services Department at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, after he did his family medicine residency.
Palliative care is an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual.
“I liked that it has a human dimension that is missing in many other areas of practice,” Dr. Abrams explains. “You become close with the family, and the relationships become intense very quickly. I like that I’m able to address the psychological, social and emotional sides of the patients’ care – to see them as people. It’s a privilege to be taken into people’s homes and hearts in this way. This journey they’re on, we’re all in together. It’s a privilege to be allowed to travel with them on that journey.”