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Home Health & Hospice Week

Hospice:

Address This Major Unmet Need For Hospice Patients In SNFs

Published on Fri Feb 17, 2012

Don't fall short in managing shortness of breath in terminally ill patients. Hospices serving large numbers of patients in nursing homes are firmly in the feds' crosshairs. But you can use a recent study to show just how much hospice care is helping the nursing home patients you serve with one specific measure. A recent study from Brown University states that "for nursing home patients not in hospice, one in five family members reported an unmet need for shortness of breath while that was only 6.1 percent for people in hospice." But to tout this quantifiable measure of hospice care's benefits, you should make sure you're addressing the problem. Assessing shortness of breath "in this population of patients is no different from what should be the good practice of medicine, based on the context of where the patient is in their life's trajectory," advises physician Joel Policzer, national medical director [...]
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