Palliative Care or Hospice Care provides services at home or in a home-like
setting to persons with life-threatening and terminal illnesses and their
families. The aim is to help people live as comfortably and as fully as
possible. The focus is on caring, not curing and on life, not death.
Care is usually provided by an interdisciplinary team of professionals and
volunteers including doctors, nurses, therapists, clergy, homemakers and other
counselors and caregivers. The goal of the team is to ensure that the emotional,
spiritual, physical and practical needs of both the client and their family are
met. Typically, people do not enter hospice care until their projected final few
months of life.
A Palliative Care or Hospice Program may provide some or all of the
following: emotional support, collaboration and coordination with other
agencies, personal care, respite care, spiritual support, financial and legal
planning, family support and bereavement support.
Most Palliative and Hospice Care providers are charitable, not-profit
groups that provide the services at no cost to the resident.