Physicians’ discomfort with talking about end-of-life issues has blocked hospice access, but there may be a way around that. A recent Harvard Medical School study shows that after watching a six-minute video about hospice, patients with advanced cancer were more likely to use hospice services before they died (85.2 percent versus 63.6 percent) and had longer lengths of stay (median of 12 days versus 3 days), says a study published June 8 in the peer-reviewed journal Cancer.
Caregivers assigned to view the video were more likely to prefer hospice for their loved ones (94.4 percent vs 65.4 percent) and were less likely to endorse that hospice is only about death (0.0 percent vs 23.1 percent), says the study’s abstract at https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/cncr.32967.