Hospice Defined

Hospice is a medical discipline dedicated to comfort and support, not to curing a condition or disease. If started early in the disease process, hospice can provide great physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual comfort and support – often significantly improving your quality of life.

By definition, hospice care is:

• For a medical diagnosis or condition with a life expectancy of 6 months or less;
• Provided in the comfort of your home, under a doctor’s direction, and on your terms;
• Intermittent rather than full-time in nature;
• Typically paid 100% by Medicare or private insurance;
• Involves a multidisciplinary approach with nurses, aides, social workers, and others acting as a team to support not only you, but your family also through this time of significant change. 

As you’ll soon learn, we feel VERY strongly not only about honoring “patient choice” (a current catch-phrase value in healthcare) but also in making that choice as well-informed and useful to you as possible. It is in nailing these two objectives that matter most to us.  

Getting the Services You Need

Once a hospice diagnosis is established by your physician, a hospice agency is selected to provide the services. However, it is vital that you have a choice in the services that will best fit your care goals.

The typical way patients are assigned a hospice agency is that a physician or a hospital discharge planner will refer a hospice agency they are familiar with, (or in many cases the agency for which the physician is a paid medical director).

That would be just fine, if every agency was exactly like every other agency, but they are not. Well, they are alike in that they must all follow the same federal guidelines for services provided and for meeting minimum standards of care; but they are often wildly different in: 

• Whether they are a nonprofit or a for profit agency,
• The types, number, and quality of the services they provide, 
• The training and experience of their clinical staff, 
• The availability and involvement of their paid medical directors, and
• Multiple other differences.

The most important point here is that the choice is yours! You want the best possible care from the most qualified providers working with the hospice agency that provides the best and most services available to you under the federal hospice benefit. 

Hospice Coaching and Support

Helping you find the best possible hospice care requires a multi-step process

1. Choose the professional practitioners and caregivers first. The experience and expertise of hospice clinicians and caregivers varies widely. Who you choose to care for you is ALL important!
2. Choose the hospice agency next. The nurse case manager (responsible for coordinating all hospice cares) will typically work for a good agency, an agency that provides an adequate number of quality services, but this shouldn’t just be assumed.
3. Determine who the primary family caregiver will be. This person typically coordinates all of the hospice cares you will receive. They are in a position to represent your best wishes, even if you are unable to decide for yourself. This is a demanding but necessary role, one that requires significant support from extended family, the hospice agency, and available community resources.
4. Make end of life planning decisions. Known collectively as advance directives, these are documents that clarify your wishes, should you be unable to speak for yourself. Detailed information can be found in the free e-book below.