Palliative vs Hospice Care

When you or a loved one are faced with a diagnosis of a serious illness, choosing the type of care that would be best can feel confusing and overwhelming. But by understanding the options and planning for when an illness progresses, you can make sure to prioritize the health goals that matter most and maximize your quality of life.

Both palliative and hospice care aim to improve the quality of life for people suffering serious illnesses, but they aren’t quite the same. One key difference is that to receive palliative care, you don’t first need to have a six-month prognosis. Unlike hospice care, you can receive palliative care at any point along your disease’s trajectory. You can also continue aggressively seeking treatment for your illness alongside palliative care, but for hospice care, you must first stop all curative treatments.

Palliative care is a medical specialty that focuses on helping people with serious illnesses get relief from the symptoms, pain, and side effects. Palliative providers can help you to focus on treating the symptoms that are affecting your quality of life, even as you receive treatment for the illness from other health care providers.

Palliative care can assist with navigating the pros and cons of medical interventions, such as ongoing hospitalizations or procedures related to your serious illness. Palliative care providers can also give you support and guidance in your decision-making process, including helping you with advance care planning, such as thinking, discussing, and recording your health care wishes to make sure that they’re known, understood, and respected in the event of you becoming unable to advocate for yourself.

Palliative care is appropriate for every stage of a serious illness, from diagnosis to the end of your life, and you can continue seeking out curative treatments. Palliative care is appropriate for serious illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, Parkinson’s disease, cancer, heart failure, liver, lung, and kidney diseases, strokes, and more.

Palliative care can help to reduce the negative impact of the disease on your quality of life. Addressing quality of life means more than simply tackling the physical symptoms. In addition to pain relief and treatment guidance, your care team can provide emotional and spiritual support. You can work with your care team to define the quality-of-life goals that matter to you, and work towards them together.

Palliative care can also improve the quality of life for your caregivers by allowing them to share duties with a qualified health team. Palliative specialists can educate caregivers on how they can expect the illness to progress, as well as equipping them with the practical tools they will need to help assist their loved ones.

Where you will receive palliative care will depend on your chosen health provider, and the services that they offer. Some of the possibilities include receiving care at home as part of an outpatient program, during a short-term hospital stay, or within a long term or chronic care setting. Generally, palliative care is covered under Medicare Part B, and under most private insurance plans.