The idea is that if someone you love has an incurable illness, and treatment to prolong life and keep the illness under control no longer works, there is still something that medical science can do. Even if life cannot be prolonged, comfort can always be provided, and it should be provided effectively. Although hospice is an idea not dependent on a particular place or facility, hospice is delivered to the patient and the family at a place. The place is most often the patient's home because that's where most people would like to be in their final months. There are times when for reasons of problems with availability of specific treatments or when the primary caregiver is too old, frail, or ill to provide care that hospice is delivered somewhere other than the home of the patient.
Some hospices have inpatient facilities.
These could be free-standing buildings or designated rooms in a hospital or nursing home. When hospice care is provided outside the home, every effort is made to make the place as homelike as possible. Making a hospital room or a nursing-home room homelike takes imagination and work. Children should be allowed to visit, and within reason, pets should have access to the patient. Hospice care is directed at the entire family, so wherever it's provided, it consists of more than just nursing care and medications for comfort.