Ronald Panzer
Description
Product description The Hospice Patients Alliance Family Guide to Hospice Care is the most complete source of information about hospice and end-of-lif
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e services available which is written from the patient advocacy point of view. It includes easy to understand explanations of the standards of care: what should and should not be done, how to help your loved one, what types of problems commonly arise and how to resolve those difficulties. The Guide reveals what NO hospice will ever tell you! (You may learn SOME of these things after you've already used a hospice, but then it will be too late!) Learn what services are required to be provided. Learn what services hospices may not always provide and why. Understand what the dying process is truly like and how good end-of-life services can promote comfort and dignity and make for a "death with dignity." This book contains information that many hospice nurses and staff don't even know. It contains information that some "rogue" hospices do not want their staff to know. It contains information you absolutely need to know if you wish to protect your loved one and get the very best care available! In addition, some staff don't know what is good palliative care (the type of medical/nursing services provided to the terminally ill). Pouring morphine and sedatives down a patient's throat is not all there is to know about hospice. Excellent assessment and analytical skills are needed to properly intervene in many hospice situations! For example, morphine may do nothing for a patient with excruciating pain due to intestinal cramping and cancer, but another non-narcotic medication may relieve it almost instantly! Increasing the dose of morphine would be the choice for an inexperienced hospice nurse; getting an order for the medication that would help most is the choice of an experienced and competent hospice nurse: the difference would make all the difference for the patient. In one situation, the patient could die due to an overdosage of morphine; in the other, the patient's pain is relieved and he lives out his life as comfortably as can be assured with the best of medical care till a natural death occurs. But that doesn't always happen. The hospice industry has very cleverly "marketed" itself through radio, TV and newspaper ads as well as community fundraising efforts. There is a real "wall of silence" blocking the truth from getting out about problems in the hospice industry. The government, HMOs, and private insurance companies all stand to benefit by reducing costs of providing health care when hospice services are used. However, hospices themselves try to reduce their expenses by NOT providing needed services. They get paid on a "per diem" basis, which rewards them financially for providing fewer services, even if those services are desperately needed. Review "...an invaluable resource when my father was at home... gave us insight and prepared us for what was occurring" -- Linda Reiter, loving daughter February, 2000 "...explains all you need to know about hospice... a book written for patients, families, caregivers, and even hospice staff." -- Anne Greco, former hospice nurse December 1, 1999 From the Author I wrote this book for all those patients, families, caregivers (and even staff) who so desperately need complete, honest and up-front information about what is going on, what needs to be done and how to overcome the lack of information, incomplete information or outright false information sometimes handed out by "rogue" hospices or misinformed staff who may be committing Medicare or Medicaid fraud. While there are over 3,100 separate hospice agencies in the USA, each a separate business, some of these hospices are violating the standards of care knowingly! These hospices and their staff have abandoned the original mission of hospice. The public image of hospice services is untarnished and completely inaccurate, even though some hospices don't provide services that meet up to that ima
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