Music, the Brain, and End-of-Life Care
A recent study published in PLOS ONE explores how music influences the way the brain processes, learns, and remembers information. The researchers found that listening to music - especially music that is familiar and predictable - can significantly affect attention,...
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...
How Can Virtual Nurses Improve Hospice at Home Quality of Care
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...
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...
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...
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...
Beyond the Diagnosis: Presence, Empathy, and Clinical Care
The multiple facets of healthcare In most conversations about healthcare, we talk about the clinical side first.Did the doctor order the right tests?Was the surgery successful?What did the scan show? Those questions matter, of course. But if you’ve ever been the...
The Value of Timely Hospice Enrollment
Despite the clear benefits of hospice care, many patients are referred very late - sometimes in their final days of life - limiting the opportunity to benefit from its full scope. Two of the most commonly cited reasons for this delayed referral are: Clinician-related...
What Is Hospice? Finding Meaning in Comfort and Care
The New England Journal of Medicine recently published a Perspective titled “What Is Hospice?” - a piece that captures, in striking detail, what hospice truly means beyond the policies, programs, and checklists that are so often discussed in healthcare. It begins with...
Hospice Voices and End-of-Life Choices: A Powerful Call for Compassion
A shift is unfolding across the United States as more states are enacting Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) laws. This legislation allows terminally ill, mentally capable adults with a prognosis of six months or less to request medication to end their lives peacefully. As...