Eli's Hospice Insider
Palliative Care Providers Crowd Out Traditional Hospice
The rise of palliative care in non-hospice settings is tightening traditional hospice programs’ budgets.
For example: Hospice Buffalo in New York is trimming 17 FTE positions due to reduced utilization, reports The Buffalo News. And since December the organization has let the equivalent of 38 full-time workers leave without replacing them.
More patients are using end-of-life services provided by hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities, who continue to refer patients to traditional hospice, but do so when the patients are closer to death.
“We’ve gone from a period where, five years ago, people didn’t know what palliative care was to, now, everybody’s offering their own version of it,” Dr. Christopher Kerr, Hospice Buffalo’s chief medical officer and acting interim CEO, tells the newspaper.
Kerr says the other institutions that offer palliative care don’t offer the full range of services provided by Hospice Buffalo, such as 13 months of follow-up bereavement support for survivors.
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