Hospice care is available to people with all sorts of incurable conditions, including but not limited to cancer, heart failure, lung disease, motor neurone disease, dementia and Parkinson’s. People can seek hospice care at any stage of their illness, not just at the very end of their life.

Your GP or a hospital doctor would usually refer you for hospice care, or you may be referred by a community nurse. You can self-refer as well, although the clinical team will ask for information from clinical teams involved in your care.

In deciding whether hospice care is right for you, your healthcare team will weigh up a number of things, such as:

• whether you have become physically unwell and symptomatic and would benefit from receiving advice and treatment in a hospice setting
• whether you would like support planning for the future
• whether you would benefit emotionally from the kind of group support and companionship that hospices can offer
• whether it might be helpful to have counselling and other kinds of therapies at this point.

Seeking a referral to Katharine House Hospice

Watch our video from Victoria Bradley, Clinical Lead Consultant at Katharine House Hospice.

Read the transcript

Related pages

• How to access our services: find out more about how to get hospice care at Katharine House Hospice.
• How we help: Katharine House Hospice provides end-of-life care in the community, at the hospice itself and in local hospitals, together with lymphoedema treatment, psychological and spiritual care, and social and bereavement support.
• What is hospice care?: find out what different types of care a hospice provides following a diagnosis of an incurable illness.

The EPiC Resource Centre is kindly sponsored by Cleenol: working for a cleaner, safer, kinder world.