The Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association defines hospice palliative care as follows:

Hospice palliative care aims to relieve suffering and improve the quality of living and dying.

Hospice palliative care strives to help patients and families:

• address physical, psychological, social, spiritual and practical issues
  and their associate expectations, needs hopes and fears
• prepare for and manage self-determined life closure and the dying process
• cope with loss and grief during the illness and bereavement

Hospice palliative care aims to:

• treat all active issues
• prevent new issues from occurring
• promote opportunities for meaningful and valuable experiences, personal
  and spiritual growth, and self-actualization

Hospice palliative care is appropriate for any patient and/or family living with, or at risk of developing a life-threatening illness due to any diagnosis, with any prognosis, regardless of age and at any time they have unmet expectations and/or needs, and are prepared to accept care.

Hospice palliative care may complement and enhance disease-modifying therapy or it may become the total focus of care.

Hospice palliative care is most effectively delivered by an interdisciplinary team of health care providers who are both knowledgeable and skilled in all aspects of the caring process related to their discipline of practice. These providers are typically trained by schools or organizations that are governed by educational standards. Once licensed, providers are accountable to standards of professional conduct that are set by licensing bodies and/or processional associations.

Ref: A Model to Guide Hospice Palliative Care, Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association, Ottawa , Canada , 2002