Public Health - Hospices the Term Paper

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By definition, this means that sicker patients receive more attention from staff than less sick patients. By contrast, hospice patients all receive much more similar attention.

Whereas the medical treatments provided by hospitals are often complicated, requiring numerous types of medical specialists, their concern for their patients' psychological state is not their specialty. Hospice staff function as, and often consider themselves "specialists" whose specialty is the emotional well-being of their patients. Many hospice staff have considerable previous experience in traditional nursing; according to them, hospital settings provide even the most caring hospital nurse only comparatively brief opportunities to contribute to their patients' emotional state and their other non-medical comfort needs (Caplan, Engelhardt & McCartney 1981). Within the hospice environment, medical care assumes a much smaller role and staff members devote more effort to their patients' comfort than to any other responsibility.

Many hospice staff members relate that much of their original motivation for entering the medical field was that they enjoyed caring for others. Some of them express that working in a hospice allows them to focus more on this aspect of their vocational choice. On the other hand, hospice staff members also describe the challenges of their position: specifically, under most circumstances, hospital patients spend much less time in the facility and when they leave it is to return home, not to die. Hospice staff form longer relationships with their patients, they get to know them much better, and all of them eventually die at the facility.

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In many cases, hospice staff cannot help going through a mourning process when patients die, and this is one of the reasons that some of them do choose to return to traditional nursing.

Conclusion:

Modern medicine offers treatment and hope for many patients who would have had no chance of recovery only a few decades ago. However, sometimes even the best efforts of dedicated medical professionals is insufficient to reverse terminal disease.

Luckily, in most cases, palliative care is available to treat pain, but where death is inevitable, hospice care offers a different approach to death. Once the inevitability of death is accepted, patients, their families, and hospice employees all report that the hospice environment may provide a better end-of-life situation than even the best medical care available in traditional medical facility environments......

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