A wonderful piece in the New York Times, under above heading, draws timely attention to the inadequacies of the current delivery of hospice service.
When a doctor said my father had about six months to live, I invited a hospice representative to my parents' kitchen table. She went over their Medicare-funded services, including weekly check-ins from a nurse and 24/7 emergency oversight by a doctor. Most comfortingly, she told us if a final "crisis" came, such as severe pain or agitation, a registered nurse would stay in his room around the clock to treat him.
At 7 p.m. on the night before my father's last day of life, his abdominal pain spiked. Since his nurse turned off her phone at 5, I called the hospice switchboard. To my surprise, no doctor was available, and it took the receptionist an hour to reach a nurse by phone. She told us we should double his dose of oxycodone, but that made no difference. We needed a house call.
The only on-call nurse was helping another family two hours away. So my sister and I experimented with Ativan and more oxycodone, then fumbled through administering a dose of morphine that my mother found in a cabinet, left over from a past hospital visit. That was lucky, because when the nurse arrived at midnight, she brought no painkillers.
After the nurse left, my father's pain broke through the morphine. I called the switchboard again, and it took three hours for a new nurse to come. She was surprised he hadn't been set up with a pump for a more effective painkiller. She agreed that this constituted a crisis and should trigger the promised round-the-clock care. She made a phone call and told us the crisis nurse would arrive by 8 a.m.
The nurse did not come at 8 a.m. Or 9 a.m. When his case worker was back on duty, she told us — apologetically — that the nurse on that shift had come down with strep throat. Her supervisor stopped by, showed us the proper way to deliver morphine (we'd been doing it wrong) and told us a pain pump and a crisis nurse should arrive by noon.
Noon passed, then 1 p.m., 2 p.m. No nurse, no pump.
By this time, my father had slipped into a coma without our noticing; we were thankful his pain was over but heartbroken he wouldn't hear our goodbyes. Finally, at 4 p.m., the nurse arrived — a kind, energetic woman from Poland. But there was little left to do. My father died an hour later.
Without getting into the specifics of pain relief, or the complex incentives in the capitation payment system, let me suggest that the earlier the partnering team discusses all the options, and the more patient, family, and team, make affirmative choices between hospices, based in part on this government data, on whether certain steps were followed, the pressures for quality to increase. I would go further and say that any hospice for which this data is not available, for whatever reason, is just off the list.
There were also some great letters in response to the article.
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