If you are a person trying to navigate a loved one’s illness and are trying to learn about different options that are available to your friend or family member, you may have wondered about the difference between palliative care and hospice. In order to better understand the disparity between the two at-home medical services, continue reading.
Palliative care is a healthcare process aimed at bettering the quality of life and decreasing the pain that people with serious illnesses are experiencing. Palliative care is offered to people that have complex chronic illnesses that cannot be cured. Those illnesses could include cancer, heart failure, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or ALS. Palliative care can occur for a short time in the hospital but is most often administered to outpatients.
Hospice is a medical care process that is also intended to help decrease the suffering and better the quality of life of a chronically ill patient. Hospice care is reserved for individuals who are nearing the end of their lives. Typically the patient is given a prognosis of six months or less. It is entirely possible that the person could live longer than six months if the course of the illness runs unexpectedly. The purpose of hospice is to help people live out their life in as little pain as possible. Another purpose of hospice care is to help support the emotional, mental, and spiritual needs of the patient. Hospice care is typically administered completely out of the individual’s home.
The difference between palliative care and hospice is slight. As previously mentioned, both palliative care and hospice care are aimed to better the quality of life and decrease the pain of patients with chronic diseases. However, the purposes and diagnoses of palliative care and hospice care are different.
Palliative care can be administered at any stage of a disease and is conducted in concurrence with treatments aimed to cure the illness. Patients go into hospice care when there is a diagnosis of a disease in which the time prediction that the patient has is six months or less. The aims of hospice care are not to cure the disease but purely to provide comfort. Lastly, to be eligible for hospice, an individual must have multiple opinions from different physicians that they have less than six months to live, while a person can enter palliative care at any stage of their illness.
As part of both palliative care and hospice care, there are several different forms of support administered. Support can include regular home visits or full-time care with a healthcare professional. There also may be virtual visits with the patient and their doctor. Oftentimes the kind of care that is administered is based on the individual’s illness, insurance coverage, and the family and patient’s situations.
Here at CareXM, we offer services to hospitals, physicians, pediatrics, and other medical providers. However, our technology and services are most often used and useful to those in palliative care and hospice. We offer a wide variety of options to help your company better communicate with and assist your patients. If you are a care provider and want to create more support for your patients in palliative care or hospice, consider CareXM as a solution. Contact us today for more information.