- So palliative care is a specialty, a subspecialty really of medicine where we, Kristine and I, see patients with chronic illnesses, progressive illnesses such as heart failure, COPD, dementia and cancer, just to name a few disease processes.

With that, we support the family in establishing their goals of care.

And we help with symptom management such as with like a cancer patient, for instance, we help manage their pain, help manage anxiety, constipation, things like that.

So... - Now I guess we better explain too how this is different from hospice care, which I think more people are probably familiar with that than palliative care.

So how is this different from hospice care?

- So palliative does get confused with hospice care often.

Both help to provide support to patients and families.

The important thing to note about palliative care is that patients can benefit from palliative care services at any point throughout their disease process, even while they're still pursuing all active disease treatments including hospitalizations, chemotherapy for cancer-related treatment.

Palliative can follow along to provide that support and symptom management to help them achieve better quality of life in spite of wherever they are in their disease or whatever treatments they are receiving.