Ethics in Hospice Care

Ethics in Hospice Care: Challenges to Hospice Values in a Changing Health Care Environment explores the pressures and challenges facing hospice and aims to produce new studies and educational materials on hospice ethics to help professionals in the field. Many of the tensions felt by caregivers and practitioners in hospice stem from uncertainty about the ethical mission of hospice and the ethical dilemmas arising in practice. This volume, a result of The Hastings Center and the Hospice Foundation of America’s project on Ethical and Policy Issues in Hospice Care, addresses these issues in a clear, accessible way.

Ethics in Hospice Care outlines the economic, social, and cultural challenges facing hospice care in a changing society and a changing health care environment. Issues of concern include:

• financial pressures as policymakers limit Medicare spending
• organizational pressures as hospice organizations enter a variety of new relationships with managed care organizations, home health agencies, and hospitals
• cultural and social challenges as Americans wrestle with moral and legal issues of death and dying and physician-assisted suicide
• the rapid and unplanned growth of the movement–from a single hospice in 1973 to over 2500 today
  
  While primarily for practicing hospice professionals, Ethics in Hospice Care is vital reading for everyone concerned with assisted suicide, patients’rights, quality of life, managed care, physician referral, professional development, pain management, quality of care, and ethics committees.