Her elevator speech definition: Palliative care is a whole person approach to medicine for patients with a terminal diagnosis who are still undergoing active treatment.
FWIW definitions like that didn't help me understand what palliative care means in practice or what it would have done for me as a caregiver, apart from its well-defined subset of hospice. People kept asking me if I had considered "palliative care", but could never define what it was. I don't think that was just a polite way of saying hospice - it was a distinct group at the same VNA. It didn't help that this palliative team I tried talking to was small and there was some administrative weirdness. In the end it didn't matter for me - full on hospice was definitively appropriate, and they did their job very well. But in the interests of helping others in a similar situation, more concrete explanations of the mechanics would help!
