Palliative Care

Abstract Palliative care has evolved into a specialty grounded in the concept of engaging with patients, from the time of diagnosis of serious illness and regardless of their place on the health-illness continuum, as whole people, interconnected with their families, caregivers, and communities. As the practice disciplines of modern hospice and palliative care emerged and evolved across the past 50 years, so too has the terminology used to describe what is now referred to as the specialty of palliative care. In addition to the terminology used in the world of professionals and the public, palliative care clinicians have integrated terms and descriptors that are part of the parlance of the specialty. Just as palliative care addresses all dimensions of a person’s life, it requires a team of diverse clinicians, each an expert in their domain, to provide comprehensive, coordinated, whole-person care. Because this specialty brings together professionals from varied educational backgrounds and care settings to work together under one tent—and because their population can include patients of any age, and with virtually any serious illness, there are naturally differences of opinion about the terms used and how practitioners understand them. This chapter explores the macro, meso, and micro landscapes of palliative care: its origin story, common definitions, linguistic controversies, and U.S. versus international perspectives; the language of teams, teamwork, and team terminology; and the ground-level terminology adopted by the specialty to define practitioners and practice, with the goal of setting a course for future work.