Stories & Reflections

What I Saw, Shadowing a Palliative Care Team for a Day

A day ago, I spent a morning shadowing a palliative care team from PalCare Mumbai on two home visits. One was a new patient being onboarded — a family just beginning this journey. The other was a bereavement visit, to a family whose loved one had passed two days earlier.

I went in as an observer. I came out having learned more about what real palliative care looks like than I had in months of reading about it.

I’m sharing this not to promote anyone or anything, but because I think more people — especially families currently caring for someone seriously ill — should know what’s possible when care is done right.

The Team

Three people showed up together: a doctor, a nurse, and a counselor. Not one after another. Together, every time, every visit. I’d read about multidisciplinary care before. Watching it in a living room is different.

What struck me first was how naturally they moved around each other. Nobody stepped on anybody’s role. The doctor didn’t rush the emotional parts to get to the clinical ones. The counselor didn’t hover awkwardly while medical decisions were made. It felt less like three professionals executing a protocol and more like three people who had simply learned, over time, how to be in a room with a family in crisis without making it worse.

The Onboarding Visit

The family had a loved one recently diagnosed, referred here from a well-known hospital’s palliative care ward. The team had scheduled this visit in advance, and it lasted close to two hours.

Here’s what surprised me: almost none of that time was spent on medicine.

They started by simply talking. Who is this family? What have they been through? Who actually makes decisions when things get hard? At one point, the counselor pulled out her phone and video-called a daughter who couldn’t be there in person — not as an afterthought, but because leaving her out of this conversation wasn’t an option. Everyone needed to hear the same thing, together, from the start.

Only after all of this — after tears, after the family’s story had been heard in full — did the team turn to the discharge papers. They reviewed the existing treatment plan, explained what they wanted to adjust and why, and asked for consent before changing anything. A new file was opened. Instructions were written down, not just spoken. They explained, in plain terms, what an emergency would look like and exactly who to call. Before they left, a WhatsApp group was created so the whole family — including the daughter on the video call — would stay on the same page.

Two hours, for one visit. I understood, watching it, why teams like this can only take on so many families. You cannot rush trust.

The Bereavement Visit

The second visit was shorter — about thirty minutes — but it has stayed with me longer.

The patient had passed away two days before. Normally, PalCare visits families about two weeks after a loss, but this family had asked to meet sooner; they wanted to finish what needed finishing and begin moving forward. The team adjusted, without hesitation.

This time, the counselor led. Not the doctor. The conversation wasn’t about medicine at all — it was about the year this family had lived through, spoken aloud, witnessed, and honored. Then a quiet thank-you, and the team left.

I don’t think most people know that this kind of visit exists. A structured, caring return — not to check a box, but simply to make sure a grieving family isn’t left alone with everything they’re carrying.

What This Made Me Think About

A few things sat with me afterward.

First: this team caps itself at 40–45 families a month, by choice. When I asked if they could take on more, the answer was immediate — quality would suffer. In a country where “scale” is often treated as the highest virtue, there was something quietly radical about a team saying no, this is the limit, because the people in front of us deserve better than being rushed.

Second: neither family I met that day was poor. Both had already spent considerable money at other facilities before arriving here. It made me realize how easy it is to assume that free, NGO-run care is only for those who have no other option. The truth seems more complicated — sometimes families arrive here not because they can’t afford care, but because they haven’t yet found care that actually sees them.

Third: everything — the medicines, the syringes, even morphine patches and tablets — was provided at no cost, for what the family needed immediately. What wasn’t available, the family was told plainly they’d need to arrange themselves. No confusion, no false promises. Just honesty about what could and couldn’t be provided.

Why I’m Writing This Down

I’ve walked this road myself, in a smaller way — my mother is oxygen-dependent at home, and my father has been her primary caregiver for years. I know what it feels like to not know who to call, or whether the person on the other end of the phone actually understands what you’re going through.

What I saw that day wasn’t complicated. It was two teams of people choosing to be unhurried, honest, and present — at the exact moments most systems tend to rush past. That’s not a small thing. For a family in the middle of the hardest chapter of their lives, it might be the only thing that matters.

If you’re caring for someone at home right now, I hope you find people who show up like this for you. And if you know of a team that does — I’d love to hear about it.

Continue Exploring

This is part of our Stories & Reflections series. Related reading: The Day I Learned I Was Wrong About Her Comfort. For the practical side of what palliative care involves, see our Understanding Palliative Care guides.

If this gave you a clearer picture of what good care can look like, there’s more where this came from. Subscribe for plain-language guides and reflections on caring for a loved one with serious illness, written from Mumbai for families anywhere. Have a story or a question of your own? Send it in — sam-bhava reads every one, even though it can’t offer individual medical advice.