What is Palliative Care?
Palliative care is an approach to caring for patients with advanced or serious illness, centered around promoting quality of life. Its focus is to address distressing symptoms and goals of care while providing compassionate care for patients and their loved ones.
Palliative Care can help with:
- Symptom management
- Educating for better understanding of illness
- Discussing prognosis
- Discussing goals of care
- Establishing an overall plan of care
- Providing emotional support
- Advance care planning, including identifying a health care proxy and documenting wishes for the future
- Information about community resources and helping with referrals
- Hospice eligibility assessment and Hospice program information
How is Palliative Care different from Hospice?
Often, the term "palliative care" is confused with Hospice care. Palliative care is an all-inclusive term for care devoted to improving comfort and helping patients live their best possible life. Palliative care is available to patients with serious illness at any time. In contrast, Hospice is an insurance benefit that provides a comprehensive program for patients whose life expectancy is six months or less and are no longer seeking curative treatment for their underlying disease.