Kathleen Unroe, M.D., MHA, M.S., explains why all nursing homes should have non-hospice palliative care.
Transcript:
Unfortunately, palliative care is not consistently and widely available in every nursing home in the United States. It really depends on where you live. Every nursing home, pretty much, will have a contract with hospice so you can receive hospice care in the nursing home, but non-hospice palliative care is harder to come by. People in nursing homes, they may be there for a short time, — for weeks — but sometimes they’re there for years near the end of their lives. Many people in nursing homes, particularly people with advanced dementia, have goals of care consistent with comfort. They may actually not be hospice eligible — not be in that defined last six months of life which is the parameters of the Medicare hospice benefit — but still benefit from supportive palliative care treatment.
Dr. Unroe describes the goals of her study to define the standard for palliative care in nursing homes.
Transcript:
Despite documented unmet needs for palliative care in nursing homes, we struggle to deliver these services. It is happening, though. In some markets and some facilities, you can find examples of palliative care consults in nursing homes delivering excellent supportive care to residents. The goal of this study was to interview people who are doing this work and to define how they’re doing it so that we can create a best practice model. Sometimes in academia, we think through what is known about the evidence base in the literature, and we create a model that we want to test in the real world. But this research is pulling from people working in the field right now to help define what that standard of care should be.
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