Aging Matters

Recent personal experience involving my mom and mother-in-law motivated me to write about hospice care for this month’s column.

Common misconceptions about hospice include the idea that hospice is only applicable to the last weeks of life, and that you must be at home, or bed-ridden, to qualify for hospice care. This column will dispel these misconceptions and provide you with some information that could prepare you and your loved ones for intelligent decisions about hospice care.

Hospice is, in fact, a way of caring for people who have a terminal illness. Hospice care can be delivered wherever the person needing the care is located – whether in a home, apartment, or long-term care facility. Perhaps its most important attribute is that hospice is medical care with the goal of comfort rather than curing illness.

The critical first step is to determine, with the help of a medical doctor, whether the patient’s situation warrants what’s called palliative care – comfort care, limited to management of symptoms – or whether the patient wants to continue trying to cure the life-limiting disease.

Hospice care is a medical benefit of the Medicare system. Eligibility is determined based on satisfying four conditions: eligibility for Medicare Part A (hospital insurance); certification by a doctor and a hospice medical director to the effect that the patient has a terminal illness that normally would limit life to six months; signing a statement choosing hospice care to treat the terminal illness; and receiving care from a Medicare-approved hospice program. (Note that patients are not necessarily ‘kicked out’ of hospice care if they do last beyond six months!)

Hospice care is delivered by a team of people, including the patient’s doctor, a nurse, a social worker, counselors, home-health aides, and volunteers. Care is available 24 hours daily, and extends to the patient’s family as well as the patient. Finally, if the terminal illness retreats for a time, the patient can opt out of hospice care, and enter into it again without penalty.

For more information, try the local authorized hospice provider, Hospice of Kitsap County, at www.hospiceofkitsapcounty.org, or call (360) 698-4611 for a copy of its publication, “15 Things You Should Know about Hospice.” Or contact national organizations, National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, www.nhpco.org, or Hospice Association of America, www.hospice-america.org.