ISSUES FACING HOSPICE CARE

Issues Facing Hospice Care

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Issues Facing Hospice Care

Terminal illnesses are often crucial to the lives of patients. It is the last stage of disease that leads to death, if not treated at the right time with the correct treatments and therapies. Hospice care has long been a designated area of delivering palliative care to terminally ill patients. Hospice is designed to provide comprehensive interdisciplinary team-based palliative care, mostly in a place the patient calls home, for dying patients with an identifiably short prognosis. However, there can be many issues regarding the design, delivery and maintenance of hospice care standards that are offered in a country. These issues can prove to be fatal for the patients as an inadequate hospice care provision leaves them with no option other than death. Hence, we need to find out the dominant problems and issues that underlie hospice care practices to see if the current health and nursing sector is committed to delivering the correct services or not. We find that hospice care is significantly influenced by many issues that cause an adverse effect on patient's health and endurance (Kayser, Jeanis, Kris, Alison, Miaskowski, Christine, Lyons, William, Paul, Steven, 2006).

The purpose of this paper is to identify the issues that undermine hospice care practices in the U.S., describe the background of such issues, explain the reasons behind the occurrence of these issues in clinical and work areas, and describe the impact of correcting hospice care issues on nursing. The main idea is to identify the key issues in the research problem, the background that led to create issues within hospice care area, identify different variables within the sector, the significance of such issues on general and specific health of patients and the remedies that can lead to improvement of hospice care standards. We will also discuss the potential impact of the solution on the health care sector.

Hospice palliative care focuses on the physical, spiritual, emotional and social needs of people with a life-limiting illness (such as cancer, ALS or end stage heart, lung or kidney disease) and those close to them. These people are in dire need of acute care and treatments that should accompany personal attention, sympathy and continual monitoring. Hence hospice palliative care staff has to perform many other roles other than their job descriptions. This puts them into a difficult situation that should ensure that each patient should receive an adequate amount of care facilities (Fife, 2008). Residential or assisted care developed as a concept when it was realized that senior patients require care in residential premises. Since then, hospices have become an integral part of senior patients' care along with care for the terminal illness.

Hospice care has been found full of challenges and issues that destabilize the repute, and intent of providers to offer optimal care and treatment services through this mode. The key to these issues is education. A lack of awareness and education among the patients lead to potential issues in the delivery ...