What Is The Difference Between Hospice Palliative Care And Curative Care? Curative c re focuses on helping someone re over from an illness by pro iding active treatment. Hospice palliative care focuses on providing comfort, reducing symptoms and distress,
and providing opportunities for meaningful experiences, personal and spiritual growth, and self-actualization. Hospice palliative care takes a positive open approach to death and dying, and encourages discussions among the person, family and care team about death and dying, and their wishes for their care at end of life. Hospice palliative care can be provided on its own or, in some cases, with curative care. For example, a patient may be receiving hospice palliative care for cancer while, at the same time, receiving curative care for a respiratory infection. WHERE IS HOSPICE PALLIATIVE CARE PROVIDED? Hospice palliative care should be available in any setting where people die, including at home, in hospices, in hospital, in long-term and chronic care settings, in shelters and in prisons. WHEN SHOULD HOSPICE PALLIATIVE CARE BE PROVIDED? The decision about when to start hospice palliative care is made by the person and family in consultation with the care team. Under many provincial health plans, people must have a diagnosis of having six or fewer months to live to be eligible for hospice palliative care services. In reality, it is difficult to make those estimates. In some cases, the health care system continues with
The History/Origins of “Hospice Palliative Care” Dame Cecily Saunders, physician and founder of St. Christopher’s House Hospice in London, England, is credited with launching the modern hospice movement. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dame Cecily pioneered an approach to caring for the dying that focused on symptom and pain control and not on curing the underlying terminal illness. As a medical teacher, she lectured health care providers at leading universities and their affiliated teaching hospitals in both North America and Europe. In 1975, Balfour Mount coined the term “palliative care” when he brought the movement to Canada, so that one term would be acceptable in both English and French. Both hospice and palliative care movements have flourished in Canada and internationally. Palliative care programs developed primarily within larger healthcare institutions, while hospice care developed within the community – mainly as free-standing volunteer programs. Over time, these programs gradually evolved from individual,
grass roots efforts to a cohesive movement that aims to relieve
suffering and improve quality of life for those who are living with or dying from an illness.
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