Today hospice care is usually defined as “compassionate care for people facing a life-limiting illness or injury… [which involves] medical care, pain management, and emotional and spiritual support expressly tailored to the patient's needs and wishes” and further emphasized is that “at the center of hospice and palliative care is the belief that each of us has the right to die pain-free and with dignity, and that our families will receive the necessary support to allow us to do so (website of the NHPO).” This means that hospice has become a system of managing the symptoms of the terminally ill, instead of subjecting them to continuous medical treatment meant to cure them when that kind of hope just isn’t in sight. Furthermore, evidence from …show more content…
The first of these presents itself as underutilization; we know “hospice improves end-of-life care for [the] dying…by improving pain control, reducing hospitalization, and reducing use of tube feeding, but it is rarely used (JAMA).” Further research backs up this claim by stating “13% of hospice enrollees were in nursing homes while 87% were in private homes, and 70% of nursing homes had no hospice patients. Hospice use varies by region, and rates of use are associated with nursing home administrators' attitudes toward hospice and contractual obligations (JAMA).” This is indicative of the famous bureaucratic red tape, suggesting that if a hospice program isn’t lucrative in hospitals or nursing homes then the higher-ups will not let them into their facilities. Additionally, “only 29% of all patients who died in the United States in 1999 received hospice care. Although some deaths will always be sudden or occur during appropriate efforts at curative care, by any estimate, a considerable percentage of those who did not receive hospice care could have potentially benefitted from it (Ogle).” I suppose until further information about hospice care is widely distributed it will continue to be