When a person becomes ill, doctors will look at their symptoms and treat them accordingly.

While this approach addresses a patient’s immediate concerns, Caroline Hurd said today’s health care tends to be very disease focused and providers don’t always think about how a person’s illness and subsequent treatment applies to the larger fabric of their life.

Hurd said those in the medical field need to start asking themselves about how they provide care for patients and treat them as a whole, not just address the immediate issues.

This approach is called palliative care, which is the kind of medicine Hurd — a medical doctor — practices.

Hurd is also the director of education operations at the University of Washington Cambia Palliative Care Center of Excellence. On Wednesday, she was among a panel of experts who spoke on the topic at Trilogy on Redmond Ridge. The event also featured a screening of a 55-minute documentary on the topic.

The event came to Redmond Ridge after Ron Peck, who lives in Trilogy, realized that many of his fellow residents did not know much about palliative care.

“It’s still an unknown entity,” said Peck, who also sits on the palliative care center’s community advisory board.

He said Trilogy is a 55-and-older community and while residents are still active, getting older can lead to getting sick more. Peck thought having an event that would inform people about palliative care and let them know their options would be of interest for the community.

“It’s important to know this is available to us,” he said.

Peck added that while the Trilogy event was targeted toward an older audience, palliative care can be applied to patients of all ages. He said it is more holistic medicine and like Hurd, said it is “looking at the whole patient.”

“There’s more to the person (than their illness),” Peck said.

Hurd describes palliative care as specialized care for anyone with a serious illness. She said it is and extra layer of support, personalizing and individualizing things for the patient and their family.

“We do that in a lot of ways,” Hurd said.

Some of those ways include treating side effects from the patient’s initial treatment such as respiratory issues, nausea or pain. Hurd said palliative care can also mean helping patients and their families with the complicated medical system, providing a road map of what they can expect once they leave the doctor or hospital, coordinating care, connecting them with resources or even helping to arrange home visits.

Hurd said discussions about palliative care such as the one held on Wednesday at Trilogy are coming from a place of need for better medical care. She said she is excited to see these types of events happening not just in the medical field but out in communities.

Stephanie Mehl, a community educator at Providence Hospice of Seattle who also sits on the palliative care center advisory board and was the moderator for Wednesday’s event, has been part of many of these educational events. She said she has visited senior residences and libraries spreading the word about palliative care as she is “pretty passionate about this topic,” but has previously stuck to the other side of Lake Washington.

“This is the first time I’ve done it on the Eastside,” she said.