One page to keep

Palliative care, or hospice? They’re not the same thing.

Even doctors and nurses mix these two up — and the confusion costs families time they don’t get back. Here is the difference in plain language, in a page you can print and bring to your next appointment or your kitchen table.

Yours to keep — no email, no sign-up. Print it, or save it as a PDF to bring along.

All hospice includes palliative care.
Not all palliative care includes hospice.
And it is never too soon for palliative care.

Comfort, alongside treatment

Palliative care

  • Added symptom and pain relief, plus emotional and practical support, while you’re still receiving curative or life-extending treatment.
  • Can begin as early as the day of diagnosis — inpatient or outpatient. You don’t stop fighting your illness to have it.
  • Billed like other physician services (by procedure code), so it can start early and run for as long as it helps.
  • For a serious condition, it is never too soon.
Comfort, when cure is no longer the goal

Hospice

  • A specific patient status — for someone a doctor expects to live six months or less — when care shifts fully to comfort rather than cure.
  • Most often provided where you live (home, or a nursing or hospice facility), by a team that comes to you.
  • Paid as an all-inclusive daily rate covering visits, medicines, and equipment.
  • Includes 13 months of grief support for the family after a death.

What they share

Both are delivered by an interdisciplinary team — a specially trained physician, a nurse practitioner or physician associate, a social worker, a chaplain, and often a pharmacist. Both support the whole family, not only the patient, and both center on what matters most to you: your goals, your comfort, and the questions that come with serious illness.

One thing worth knowing: hospice is not the same as the final days

Because hospice begins when a doctor certifies six months or less, many families hear the word and picture the end arriving within days. It rarely works that way. Six months is a starting point, not a deadline — care is renewed every two months for as long as the illness keeps progressing, and the body keeps its own timeline. Nearly one in five people enrolled in hospice stabilize or improve enough to leave the program for a while.* President Jimmy Carter lived nearly two years in home hospice. Coming to hospice sooner usually means more good time, not less — more comfort, more support for the family, and more of the life that’s still there to live. And none of it has to be one hard conversation: the talks that matter most are a series of small ones, begun from love long before a crisis makes them urgent.

* National study of Medicare hospice discharges (Teno et al., Medical Care, 2014): 18.2% of patients were discharged alive.

“My late husband, Bob Lehmberg, MD, a palliative care and hospice physician, was — and continues to be — outlived by many of his palliative care patients. None of his hospice patients outlived him.”

— Jennifer A. O’Brien, on the difference that’s easiest to remember

Questions worth asking your care team

Bring these to your next appointment. You have every right to ask them.

  1. Is this treatment meant to cure my illness, or to help me feel better — or both?
  2. Could palliative care help me now, alongside the treatment I’m already getting?
  3. What would hospice change about my care — and how would we know when it might be the right fit?
  4. Who on my team coordinates my comfort and symptoms, and how do I reach them?
  5. If my time were short, what matters most to me — and does my care right now reflect that?

Where this comes from

The distinction and the closing line are drawn from “Palliative Care and Hospice: There’s a Difference,” by Jennifer A. O’Brien, whose late husband, Bob Lehmberg, MD, was a palliative care and hospice physician. Definitions reflect standard U.S. usage: palliative care is comfort-focused care provided alongside curative treatment from diagnosis onward; hospice is a Medicare benefit and care status for a prognosis of six months or less, and includes 13 months of family bereavement support. This page is educational and is not medical or legal advice; confirm eligibility and coverage with your own care team.