Hospice care is a type of health care that focuses on the palliation of a terminally ill patient’s pain and symptoms and attending to their emotional and spiritual needs at the end of life. Hospice care prioritizes comfort and quality of life by reducing pain and suffering and provides an alternative to therapies focused on life-prolonging measures that may be arduous, likely to cause more symptoms, or are not aligned with a person’s goals.

Palliative care is an interdisciplinary medical caregiving approach aimed at optimizing quality of life and mitigating or reducing suffering among people with serious, complex, and often terminal illnesses.

These two definitions seem very similar. Here’s the primary difference:

Hospice care is generally employed only when physicians estimate that the patient’s illness is terminal with a prognosis that death will occur within six months. Palliative care may be administered at any stage of illness (whether or not the condition is judged to be terminal), even alongside curative treatments.

For too long, the term “hospice” carried a connotation of impending death. This stigmatization frequently caused family members to postpone the inception of hospice care to stave off a mindset of “giving up” on their loved one. Sadly, this stigmatization has caused many patients and their families to endure more discomfort than was necessary.

An early start to hospice care can both (1) provide the patient with comfort and pain-mitigation at an earlier stage of their disease, and (2) give the family caregiver an extra pair of hands in caring for their loved one.

It can be a difficult decision for a loved one’s family to forego medical procedures that might be able to extend life a few more weeks or months. At some stage of the disease, there must be a reconciliation of the sometimes competing virtues of length of life and quality of life – a decision that must consider the personal values, faith, and moral code of both the patient and family … an evaluation that should not be judged by others.