It’s one thing to have palliative care services in hospitals – and that’s taken over a decade to happen; but it’s another to recognize the importance of providing specialized medical care for patients with serious illnesses outside of the hospital in an office or clinic setting.

"We’re starting to develop those services, but they’re not available widely by any stretch. I mean, it’s really where hospital-based palliative care was 15 years ago is where outpatient-based palliative care is today."

Dr. Steve Pantilat of the University of California, San Francisco, started one of the first hospital-based palliative care centers in the nation almost 20 years ago. He admits there’s still a long way to go in this field.

"We’re recognizing this as an important area for training healthcare professionals, but we still don’t have enough. We need more experts, but we also need to make sure that all doctors and nurses and social workers and chaplains are trained in the basics of palliative care, what we in the field call primary palliative care or generalist palliative care."