[Text on screen: The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
What is palliative care, and how is it different from hospice?]

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[Text on screen: Jillian Gustin, MD
Division Director of Palliative Medicine 
Ohio State Wexner Medical Center]

Jillian Gustin, MD: I'm often asked the difference between palliative care and hospice. And the way that I conceptualize it is that both are focused on maximizing quality of life for patients who are facing serious illness. For hospice care, patients need to have a prognosis of approximately six months or less for them to be eligible for hospice services. 

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Typically, these are patients who are interested in focusing exclusively on quality of life and are foregoing any kind of curative or life prolonging treatments. For palliative care, it is for patients who are at any stage in the illness trajectory. So it can be at the diagnosis or at the very end of life, or anywhere in between. And again, these are patients who want to maximize their quality of life, and at the same time want to continue with some type of disease-directed or life prolonging therapy. If someone is receiving palliative care, they're getting a whole constellation of services from an interdisciplinary team. 

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So their team will be focused on helping them with any symptoms that they're suffering from, whether it's from the illness itself or from perhaps the treatment that they're receiving. They will have a focus on their quality of life; so not just the physical symptoms, but the psychological symptoms, the spiritual distress that they may have as they're trying to figure out how to navigate a serious illness. They'll have care provided to them from not just a physician or advanced practice provider, but also from a social worker, a chaplain, a physical therapist, any of those interdisciplinary team members that can help them maximize their quality of life.

[Text on screen: The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
For more information, visit: wexnermedical.osu.edu/palliative-care]

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