Today I learned...

While palliative care can indeed be given to people at any stage of disease, hospice patients must have a physician certification that they are expected to live 6 months or less.

That said, even certified hospice-appropriate patients can be surprisingly hale and hearty right up until their final decline.

When I used to do hospice info visits with prospective clients and their families, I always told them that it does happen on occasion where someone actually improves and "graduates" from hospice, even if they did have a six month prognosis at the time of admission. I have seen this happen, particularly with patients who are admitted with debility or cardiac issues.

Okay great! thanks for the extra explanation. Anyways, someone told me the other day that a palliative care unit gets all sorts of different patients with different symptoms to treat. I hear it is great experience.

Sep 15 by cd365c

Today I learned hospice patients are not always dying. It is for any type of care that is for relieving symptoms. And the moment you think you know it all, you receive this information.

Do you find other people confused about what hospice care really is? I wonder if outsiders mostly think hospice nurses just care for the dying patients and had the same misconceptions I had.

This is not true.

Others have offered a good explanation as to the difference between hospice care and palliative care.

To review, hospice care requires a terminal diagnosis with a prognosis of 6 months or less in the medical opinion of at least two physicians. Anyone requiring help with symptom management qualifies for palliative care.

Okay great! thanks for the extra explanation. Anyways, someone told me the other day that a palliative care unit gets all sorts of different patients with different symptoms to treat. I hear it is great experience.

I have worked with a number of palliative care teams and none of them had their own "unit". Rather, when they were acute care based, the teams merely rounded on and followed the patients throughout the hospital. Upon discharge the patients were followed in the outpatient setting.

I worked for one hospice that began doing home palliative visits, billing was problematic for them. The team sometimes admitted the patient to the local hospice inpatient facility for short term symptom stabilization, but that was rare as the folks were largely engaged in aggressive disease management and their care was often not appropriate for that setting.