Keys to Compassionate Care
A hospice Quality Assessment and Performance Improvement (QAPI) program is the formal system a hospice uses to understand how well it is functioning, where it is at risk, and how it will improve over time. Under 42 CFR § 418.58, CMS requires every hospice to maintain an ongoing, hospice-wide, data-driven program that evaluates the quality and safety of care and takes...
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 are honored, how families are supported, and how clinicians balance doing what is possible with doing what...
Virtual nursing is rapidly gaining traction across healthcare, driven by workforce shortages and evolving expectations for care delivery. A recent JAMA Network Open article analyzing hospital-based virtual nursing offers important insights that extend well beyond acute care walls. While that research focuses on inpatient settings, the lessons it offers can help us...
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 emotionally exhausting rather than sustaining. An article from Psychology Today titled “Don’t Drown in Empathy,”...
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 the system they interact with can look very different from what someone in a big city sees. The “Rural...
This large-scale study analyzed 4,216 diffusion MRI brain scans from individuals aged 0 to 90. The aim of the study was to map how the brain’s structural wiring - the connections that allow different regions to communicate - changes throughout the entire human lifespan. The researchers examined how efficiently the brain moves information, how much it divides into...
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 difficult to answer and often yield answers that are harder to interpret than clinicians expect. Patients...
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 of control that still matters deeply to them. On the other hand, you can’t help noticing things that...
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 directive or clear documentation of the patient’s wishes, those decisions become even more complex....