As you will have seen from our home page, the Irish Hospice Foundation supports the development of hospice care and promotes the hospice philosophy.

• Hospice care is the specialised care of people with life-limiting illness.
• The hospice philosophy is based on the principle of wholeness, expressed in many ways – for example, it gives equal emphasis to the physical, emotional, social and spiritual well-being of the patient. The hospice philosophy takes as its starting point that death is a natural part of life; that dying is an integral life experience.

Our aim is to facilitate the practice of hospice care in all its aspects. We do this by working independently as well as in partnership with the statutory, voluntary and professional bodies concerned with hospice and palliative care in Ireland.

We are informed by the recommendations of the Report of the National Advisory Committee on Palliative Care (Department of Health & Children, 2001 - download a summary of its recommendations here); and more recently, by the HSE's Five-Year Development Framework for Palliative Care Services in Ireland - see http://www.hospice-foundation.ie/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=469&Itemid=158