What is Hospice and Palliative Care Nursing?
What is Hospice and Palliative Care Nursing?
Hospice nurses provide care primarily under the guidelines of the Medicare Benefit Act of 1983, a federal program that allows patients to die in their homes with their families and friends at their side.
The hospice movement has evolved in the United States over the past 25 years. The focus of hospice care is on comprehensive physical, psychosocial, emotional, and spiritual care to terminally ill persons and their families. Hospice providers promote quality of life by protecting patients from burdensome interventions and providing care at home, whenever possibly, instead of the hospital.
Palliative care, the more recent area of specialization, is defined by the Last Acts Task Force (1999) as the “comprehensive management of the physical, psychological, social, spiritual, and existential needs of patients, particularly those with incurable, progressive illness. The goal of palliative care is to help them achieve the best possible quality of life through relief of suffering, control of symptoms, and restoration of functional capacity, while remaining sensitive to personal, cultural and religious values, believes and practices”.
The care that both hospice and palliative care nurses provide is essentially the same as demonstrated by the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Role Delineation Study. However, hospice and palliative care nurses differ in their preparation and practice settings