Posted Thursday, October 26, 2023
Revocations of the hospice benefit can have serious negative effects on patients, families, and providers. Understanding the causes and repercussions of these incidents can help operators prevent them, when appropriate.
Live discharges can occur for a number of reasons, including the patient or family changing their minds about receiving hospice care, or the patient improves and no longer needs those services. A patient may choose to resume curative treatment, or they might move out of the hospice’s service area.
In other cases, a patient in crisis may call an ambulance which would require revocation of hospice benefits in order to receive care from the hospital.
Sara Sprague, manager of clinical quality improvement, for Providence Hospices of Orange County in California, said at the National Hospice and Palliative Organization’s (NHPCO) addressed this at the Annual Leadership Conference.
“Families don’t fully understand hospice and the scope of hospice, what it provides. There’s also a lack of clarity on disease progression and prognosis, caregiver burden, distress, or difficult to manage symptoms,” Sprauge said at the conference. “You also have caregivers’ reluctance to administer morphine, and the response time of the hospice when compared to 911, and the family’s difficulty in accepting the patient’s own mortality. What’s interesting here when you look at these items is that some of them are within the control of hospice.”
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