SAPHIR as a NURSING concept in palliative care is a comprehensive, needs-orientated support concept for patients with advanced and progressive life-threatening or life-limiting illnesses and their relatives. It involves outpatient palliative care, i.e. nursing provided at home or in inpatient nursing care facilities and hospices.

The acronym SAPHiR is made up of the first letters of the word group "Specialised Outpatient Palliative Care Heidelberg and in the Rhine-Neckar District" and is figuratively appealing as it refers to a precious stone, which in its most coveted blue variant symbolises faithfulness, loyalty and purity. Hildegard von Bingen even describes it as a healing stone for pain and inner turmoil. With our SAPHIR concept, we want to achieve a comparable effect today using medically and scientifically sound methods in particularly sensitive phases of life.

With the intention of maintaining and improving the general quality of life, palliative care is fundamentally holistic. For this reason, the holistic approach of palliative care utilises the connection to alternative methods, e.g. aroma nursing and psychosocial support services. This demonstrates the diversity of counselling and co-treatment, particularly in cases of severe, advanced illness, complex physical and psychosocial stress or in crisis situations. The SAPHIR nursing team consists of specialist nursing staff with additional qualifications in palliative medicine or palliative care and many years of experience in the care of seriously ill people. Other professional groups are therefore closely involved in the concept to provide support and assistance and can be called in by arrangement. There is close integration with other support areas such as social services, psycho-oncology, nutritional counselling, exercise therapy, ethics counselling and other services.

Thanks to the university affiliation, treatment is based on the latest scientific findings.