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Terminal illness or end-stage disease is a disease that cannot be cured or adequately treated and is expected to result in the death of the patient. This term is more commonly used for progressive diseases such as cancer , dementia , advanced heart disease , and for HIV/AIDS , or long COVID in bad cases, rather than for injury .
Palliative care (derived from the Latin root palliare, meaning "to cloak") is an interdisciplinary medical caregiving approach aimed at optimizing quality of life and mitigating suffering among people with serious, complex, and often terminal illnesses. [1]
Terminal illness insurance (known as accelerated death benefit in North America) pays out a capital sum if the policyholder is diagnosed with a terminal illness from which the policyholder is expected to die within 12 months of diagnosis by a physician who specializes in that illness or condition. The payout is still valid even if the insured ...
How humans understand and approach the process dying differs across cultures. [5] In some cultures, death is the complete termination of life. [5] In other cultures, death can include altered states of being, like sleep or illness. [5]
Additionally, with a terminal illness often comes more complicated financial stressors; the social worker can be instrumental in connecting the patient and family with community resources including services such as Meals on Wheels. [75]
Hospice care in the United States is largely defined by the practices of the Medicare system and other health insurance providers, which cover inpatient or at-home hospice care for patients with terminal diseases who are estimated to live six months or less. Hospice care under the Medicare Hospice Benefit requires documentation from two ...
Palliative care got its start as hospice care delivered largely by caregivers at religious institutions. The first formal hospice was founded in 1948 by the British physician Dame Cicely Saunders in order to care for patients with terminal illnesses. [2] She defined key physical, emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions of distress in her work.
In medicine, specifically in end-of-life care, palliative sedation (also known as terminal sedation, continuous deep sedation, or sedation for intractable distress of a dying patient) is the palliative practice of relieving distress in a terminally ill person in the last hours or days of a dying person's life, usually by means of a continuous intravenous or subcutaneous infusion of a sedative ...