Despite its growing popularity in medical centers, most People in America remain unaware of the comfort and benefits palliative care can offer some critically ill patients. “There is a clear need to notify customers about palliative care and offer customers with a definition of palliative care,” scientists requested by the Center to Advance Palliative Care advise. According to Public Opinion Research on Palliative Care, 70 % of the general population doesn’t know anything about palliative care, and 14 % were “somewhat knowledgeable.” The scientists also found that it is difficult to notify doctors about palliative care, because they often wrongly associate it with hospice care or end of life care.
Palliative care is becoming increasingly extensive. There are more than 1,600 medical centers that have palliative care programs in the U.S., according to Dr. Diane Meier, director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Some 85 % of large medical centers have a palliative care team. 67% of small medical centers have programs.
Hospice care is different from palliative care; its aim is to handle signs so that an individual’s last times are invested with pride and quality. The care is not designed to cure the illness but the person, according to the American Cancer Society. Hospice is most often used when healing therapy is no longer effective, and a terminal individual is predicted to live about six months or less. “Many individuals believe that hospice is only for individuals who have cancer. This may be due to the fact that many of the sufferers treated in the beginning of hospice were cancer sufferers,” Becky Hillier, advertising director for Rocky Mountain Hospice, had written for the Montana Standard. Less than 25 % of hospice sufferers admitted to the hospice are cancer sufferers.