End-of-Life Ethics
03/16/23 at 01:35 PM
Per Hospice News Today, 3/16/23.
News Release
March 10, 2023
Washington. DC—Hospice Foundation of America today announced the publication of End-of-Life Ethics in a Changing World, its newest book on ethics and end-of-life care, written and edited by some of the nation’s leading ethicists, healthcare professionals, and grief experts. In this volume of scholarly and personal work, end-of-life care professionals and those with an interest in medical ethics will find perspectives that both inform best practice and challenge current approaches to care for those with life-threatening illnesses. Chapters explore topics including the limitations of the Medicare Hospice Benefit; equitable access to care; use of telehealth in end-of-life care and bereavement support; medical aid in dying; voluntarily stopping eating and drinking; guiding surrogate decision makers; pain management; pediatric hospice care; and developing and training hospice ethics committees. A prominent theme addressed by book authors and editors is whether hospice, a comprehensive service that answered a collective public cry for non-medicalized death decades ago, has lost its ethical footing and moral compass as a result of its dramatic shift to a largely for-profit business model. ... “We need to ask ourselves whether, in today’s medical landscape, the restrictions around hospice care that force such binary choices are reasonable or appropriate any longer, or whether the ethos of person-centered care—care that aligns with patient’s goals and values—is instead directly challenged by hospice as it stands,” writes Alexis Drutchas, a palliative care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital.