Palliative Care
Care focused on relieving symptoms and improving quality of life in serious illness.
What it means
Palliative care aims to relieve symptoms and improve quality of life in serious illness. From the Latin palliare, to cloak or cover.
The most important correction: palliative care is not the same as end-of-life care, and does not mean treatment has stopped.
It can begin at diagnosis and run alongside active treatment, including chemotherapy and surgery. People receive palliative care for years. End-of-life care refers specifically to the last months or days, and is one part of palliative care rather than the whole of it.
In practice
Delivered by specialist teams in hospitals, hospices and at home. Hospices provide respite admissions and symptom control, and many people go home again afterwards.
Evidence shows that early palliative care alongside treatment improves quality of life, and in some studies survival too.
Why it matters
A referral to palliative care is not a signal that clinicians have given up, and refusing one on that belief means living with worse symptoms for no reason.
Advance care planning — recording preferences while well enough to express them — is a part of this that people find easier once they know it changes nothing about the treatment they receive now.
Clinically reviewed by Dr Mohammad Zubair Khan, GMC 7563469
Last reviewed
August 30, 2026