Essentials of Hospice: What Every Practitioner Needs to Know but Are Afraid to Ask

Peter Winn

Abstract


Every practitioner, regardless of specialty and setting of patient care, must advocate for and facilitate timely patient access to comprehensive palliative and hospice care as patients enter the last phase of life due to advanced serious life-limiting illness. Accordingly, practitioners need to be familiar with both the general and disease-specific eligibility guidelines for hospice, the four different levels of hospice care under the Medicare Hospice Benefit, reimbursement for services provided, and be proficient and culturally competent in advance health care planning as well as acquire expertise in the treatment of pain and non-pain symptoms that occur at end-of-life. This is critical to alleviate both patient and family suffering and to ensure dignity and a peaceful death.

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18103/imr.v5i1.777

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