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Selling Hospice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Sam Halabi
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Extract

Hospice care in the United States has undergone a remarkable transformation since it assumed its modern form in the late 1960s. It began as a movement driven by small organizations staffed with many volunteer providers focusing on comprehensive spiritual, palliative, and mental health services for a relatively small number of terminally ill patients, typically suffering from cancer. The idea behind hospice during its early days was that a terminally patient and his or her family made a decision to focus on easing a patient’s pain and anxiety, making him or her more comfortable, rather than pursuing additional curative treatment. Because these objectives required a wide range of professional and non-professional skills, hospice care involved not only physicians and nurses, but clergy, social workers, volunteer caretakers, homemakers, and, of course, family members. The process of decision-making by the patient and his or her family was never uniform and never systematically studied.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , Winter 2014 , pp. 442 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2014

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