Which statement distinguishes home health, hospice, and palliative care?

• A. Home health focuses on rehabilitation and remediation; Hospice focuses on comfort near end of life.
• B. Palliative care can be concurrent with curative treatment across settings.
• C. Home health focuses on rehabilitation and remediation; Hospice focuses on comfort near end of life; Palliative care can be concurrent with curative treatment across settings.
• D. Home health is the same as hospice.

Answer: (C)

Understanding how these care models differ helps explain why the combined statement is correct. Home health focuses on rehabilitation and helping patients regain function at home, usually with skilled nursing and therapies aimed at enabling activity and independence. Hospice centers on comfort near the end of life, emphasizing symptom relief, pain control, and support for families when curative treatment is no longer pursued. Palliative care, by contrast, is about alleviating suffering and improving quality of life for people with serious illness and can be provided at any stage of illness and alongside disease-directed treatments, in settings from hospitals to the home. Putting these together shows the distinctions and overlaps, which is why the combined statement is the best choice. The other options either omit one of these aspects or wrongly imply that home health and hospice are the same, which they are not.