Pediatric Palliative and Hospice Care

Pediatric palliative and hospice care focuses on enhancing quality of life for the child and family, preventing and minimizing suffering, optimizing function, and providing opportunities for personal and spiritual growth. This care can be provided concurrently with life-prolonging care, curative care, or as the main focus of care.

Pediatric care includes perinatal period, infancy, childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. Children refers to patients in the perinatal period, infancy, childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Young adulthood encompasses individuals over 18 years of age.

What is pediatric palliative care?

Specialty pediatric palliative care is interdisciplinary, patient- and family-centered care that supports the physical, emotional, and spiritual well being of children with serious illness.

PPC targets the prevention and relief of suffering in each of these domains and elicits patient hopes and values to ensure goal concordant medical care at all stages of illness.

NHPCO supports the field of pediatric palliative and hospice care and, therefore, most pediatric resources are free to the public. However, some resources will require an NHPCO membership or will request additional information to access.

If you have questions about NHPCO’s pediatric resources, contact pediatrics@nhpco.org.