Home Health & Hospice Week

Alaskans lag in hospice admissions.

A new national study could help you market your hospice services more effectively.

The report, sponsored by the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and published in the September 2007 issue of the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, looks at which diseases are bringing people into hospice care. It also explores hospice utilization by geographic region.

To study hospice usage, the researchers looked at records of the 1.8 million persons aged 65 and older who died in the United States in 2002. Here are some of the key findings:

• Nearly one in three older Americans used hospice services in 2002 (28.6 percent).

• Three diseases were associated most closely with hospice use: cancer (65 percent), kidney disease/ nephritis (55 percent) and Alzheimer's disease (41 percent). COPD followed as an important diagnosis, accounting for 30 percent of hospice admissions.

• Women were slightly more likely to use hospice than men in 2002, the data collection year for the study.

• These states used hospice the most: Arizona (49 percent), Colorado (45 percent) and Florida (42 percent). Alaska, Maine, South Dakota and Wyoming were the states in which hospice was used the least (8, 14, 16 and 16 percent, respectively).

Resource: For more detailed information about the study, go to www.nhcpo.org.