What is Hospice Care
Hospice & Palliative Care
Hospice is a specialized, team-based approach to support and care for individuals with life-limiting or advanced illness and their families. When curative care is no longer an option, hospice focuses on meeting the physical and emotional needs at the end of life, so that families can focus on what is important.
The goals of hospice care are to ensure comfort, enhance quality of life, and preserve dignity and choice.
What’s the difference between hospice and palliative care?
Both hospice and palliative care focus on treating symptoms (such as anxiety, nausea, pain, or difficulty sleeping) and enhancing your quality of life.
Hospice Care
Hospice care is appropriate when a physician feels that a patient’s life expectancy may be six months or less. When curative care is no longer an option, hospice focuses on providing physical comfort and emotional support so that life can be lived as fully as possible.
Palliative Care
Palliative care is appropriate at any stage of an illness and can be part of a care plan that includes treatment of a disease.
- Your symptoms are becoming hard to manage
- You are spending more time in the hospital
- Your main priority is comfort and relief from pain or other symptoms
- Curative care is no longer an option
- You are diagnosed with a condition such as heart failure, COPD, end-stage renal disease, dementia, cancer, or stroke and your illness is life-limiting