Grief in Children: 7 Essential Lessons for Hospice Social Workers
Help children navigate grief. This guide for hospice social workers explores how kids understand death and offers research-backed tools for supportive care.
Caregiving for Divorced Parents: Research on End-of-Life Care Quality
A recent study published in The Journals of Gerontology explores how marital status and social networks impact the quality of end-of-life care for older adults in the United States. Using data from the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS), researchers...
Analyzing the ‘Quiet Workforce’: New Insights into U.S. Family Caregiving
Many conversations about healthcare focus on hospitals, physicians, or emerging technologies. However, a significant portion of care in the United States occurs in a different setting: the home. Data from a recent Pew Research Center survey highlights the scale of...
Why Early End-of-Life Conversations Are Important in Hospice Care
The hospice team often meets families at one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. A loved one is nearing the end, emotions are raw, and time feels both urgent and suspended. What many families don’t realize - until they are in it - is how much harder this...
What Ethical Hospice Care Really Means at the End of Life
Hospice care is built on a simple promise: to support comfort, dignity, and quality of life when time is limited. Yet beneath that promise are complex ethical considerations that shape everyday decisions. These decisions include how symptoms are treated, how choices...
Caring with Heart and Mind: Affective and Cognitive Empathy in Hospice Care
Empathy is often described as the heart of hospice care. It allows caregivers and hospice professionals to connect deeply with patients and families during one of life’s most vulnerable transitions. Yet empathy, when misunderstood or overextended, can become...
Invisible Crisis: Rural Healthcare in a City-Centered System
You don’t have to be a policy expert to notice something basic and uncomfortable about health care in the United States: Your chances of getting timely, good care change a lot depending on where you live. Roughly one in five people in the U.S. live in rural areas. Yet...
Why “Rate Your Pain From 0 to 10” Is More Complex Than It Seems
Pain assessment is foundational to clinical care, but nowhere is it more central - or more urgent - than in hospice. The familiar questions “How much pain are you in right now?” and “Is it better or worse than last week?” are routine. Yet, they are often quite...
Helping Aging Parents: How to Balance Safety, Independence, and Love
The Emotional Tension of Aging Parents As parents grow older, many adult children find themselves in a quiet emotional struggle. On one hand, you want to respect your parents’ independence - the routines they enjoy, the home they’ve built their lives around, the sense...
AI At the End of Life: Help, Not a Decider
End-of-life decisions are some of the hardest moments any family, clinician, or hospice team will ever face. Even when a patient has had candid conversations with loved ones, the reality of decline can feel different than anything imagined. When there is no advance...