Guide
Hospice and palliative care
People often hear these words in the same week, and they are easy to blend together. They are related. They are not the same.
Palliative care is care that aims to relieve symptoms and stress at any stage of a serious illness. It can be offered alongside treatment that is still meant to cure or control the disease. Hospice is a particular form of palliative care, usually when life expectancy is limited and the main goal is comfort rather than cure. The difference is about timing and goals, not about whether someone “has given up.”
Some licensed hospices also run a palliative care program for people who are not on hospice. The Texas HCSSA license list does not include a flag that says which agencies do this. This directory will not invent that flag. If palliative care is what you need, ask the agency directly — and treat the answer as something to confirm, not as a fact you saw on a license row.
For a longer guide to palliative care in Texas, written separately from this hospice directory, see palliativecarelookup.com. It is a different website. Our shorter palliative care page points there as well.
If you are looking for hospice itself, you can search this directory or read how hospice works.