The Opportunity

Palliative care is patient- and family-centered care that optimizes quality of life by anticipating, preventing, and alleviating suffering throughout the continuum of a person’s illness by addressing physical, intellectual, emotional, social, and spiritual needs and facilitating patient autonomy, access to information, and choice.¹ With its focus on improving quality of life, palliative care is distinct from care intended to cure an illness or condition, although it can be delivered concurrently with curative therapies. End-of-life care is comprehensive care that addresses medical, emotional, spiritual, and social needs during the last stages of a person’s terminal illness.² Much end-of-life care is palliative, when life-prolonging interventions are no longer appropriate, effective, or desired.³

Improving both access to, and quality of, palliative and end-of-life care is becoming increasingly important due to the aging of the U.S. population, the projected increases in the number of Americans with chronic illnesses, disabilities, and functional limitations, and the growth in ethnic and cultural diversity, which has intensified the need for individualized, person-centered care.⁴

NQF Related Work

• Palliative and End-of-Life Care Off-Cycle Measure Review 2017 – 2017
• Palliative and End-of-Life Care – 2016
• Strategies for Change: A Collaborative Journey to Transform Advanced Illness Care – 2016

Stay Connected

For more information, please contact palliative@qualityforum.org.

1 National Quality Forum (NQF). A National Framework and Preferred Practices for Palliative and Hospice Care Quality: A Consensus Report. Washington, DC: NQF; 2006. Available at https://www.qualityforum.org/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=22041. Last accessed June 2016.

2 Institute of Medicine (IOM). Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences near the End of Life. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; 2014. Available at http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Reports/2014/Dying-In-America-Improving-Quality-and-Honoring-Individual-Preferences-Near-the-End-of-Life.aspx . Last accessed June 2016.

3 National Quality Forum (NQF). A National Framework and Preferred Practices for Palliative and Hospice Care Quality: A Consensus Report. Washington, DC: NQF; 2006. Available at https://www.qualityforum.org/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=22041. Last accessed June 2016.

4 Institute of Medicine (IOM). Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences near the End of Life. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; 2014. Available at http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Reports/2014/Dying-In-America-Improving-Quality-and-Honoring-Individual-Preferences-Near-the-End-of-Life.aspx. Last accessed June 2016.