Palliative care and community benefit can work together.

Catholic health care has cause to celebrate in terms of leadership and quality in two seemingly different areas of health care: palliative care and community benefit. At first glance, palliative care and community benefit appear to be polar opposites. Palliative care focuses on serious illness and care at the end of life while most community benefit programs are designed to keep people well, help them manage a chronic illness, and improve the health in our communities. Both palliative care and community benefit are provided in response to human need, but palliative care looks at the needs of individuals and community benefit looks at the needs of populations. In the case of palliative care, the need is for physical, emotional and spiritual support of those facing life-threatening illness. In the case of community benefit, the need is the lack of access to health care services and for health improvement through health promotion and disease prevention. Palliative care, aside from hospice care, is primarily delivered by hospitals to inpatients. Community benefit, by definition, is practiced in the community. This final distinction, however, is fading, and increasingly palliative care is being brought into the community. To explain why this distinction of where palliative care is practiced will fade, permit us to digress.