What is Hospice Care?

Hospice care is considered the gold standard for quality compassionate care for people facing terminal illness (6 months or less to live). It provides expert medical care, pain management, and emotional and spiritual support expressly tailored to the patient’s needs and wishes. Support is also provided to the patient’s family. Hospice focuses on caring, not curing, and can be provided in the patient’s home, a nursing home, an assisted living facility, or inpatient hospice facility.

Who is on the Hospice Team and What Do They Do?

Members of the hospice team make regular visits to assess the patient and provide additional care or other services. Hospice staff are on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The hospice team develops a care plan to meet each patient’s individual needs for pain management and symptom control. This interdisciplinary team usually consists of the patient’s personal physician; hospice physician or medical director; nurses; hospice aides; social workers; bereavement counselors; clergy or other spiritual counselors; trained volunteers; and speech, physical, and occupational therapists, if needed.

The hospice team:

• Manages the patient’s pain and other symptoms.
• Assists the patient and family members with the emotional, psychosocial, and spiritual aspects of dying.
• Provides medications and medical equipment.
• Instructs the family and facility staff on how to care for the patient.
• Provides grief support and counseling.
• Makes short-term inpatient care available when pain or symptoms become too difficult to manage at home, or the caregiver needs respite time.
• Delivers special services like speech and physical therapy when needed.
• Provides 13 months of grief support and counseling to surviving family and friends.

The best way to think of the hospice team is as a group of end-of-life specialists. As such, they are never intended to replace whoever the patient’s primary caregiver is - whether that be family or facility staff. Instead, they are there to work with others to ensure that the goals of hospice – comfort and dignity – are achieved.

How Does Hospice Meet the Changing Needs of Patients and Families?

Hospice patients may require differing intensities of care during the course of their illness. While hospice patients may be admitted at any level of care, changes in their status may require a change in their level of care.

The Medicare Hospice Benefit affords patients four levels of care to meet their clinical needs: 1) Routine Home Care, 2) Continuous Home Care, 3) Inpatient Respite Care, and 4) General Inpatient Care. Payment for each covers all aspects of the patient’s care related to their terminal illness, including all services delivered by the interdisciplinary team, medication, medical equipment, and supplies.