Veterans Dying At VA Continues...In A Good Way

No, Gunny, I have not lost my mind with the title. I really believe in the care hospice offers patients on the last part of their journey though their lives. It is really good to know that they do not have to stop medical care to be in this one.

Dying veterans boost participation in hospice care
Reuters
Ronnie Cohen
July 14, 2017

By 2011, they found that 44 percent of veterans who died in hospitals took their last breaths in hospice beds, compared to 30 percent in 2008. By 2012, 71 percent of veterans dying of cancer were enrolled in hospice.

(Reuters Health) - An initiative to enroll dying veterans in hospice care appears to be working, and its success may offer clues for how to persuade others who are terminally ill to join the highly lauded end-of-life program, a new study shows.

After the U.S. Veterans Administration implemented its Comprehensive End of Life Care Initiative in 2009, growth of enrollment of terminally ill male war veterans in hospice care outstripped enrollment growth in hospice programs for elderly men who did not serve, according to the report in Health Affairs.

More veterans likely enrolled in hospice care because the initiative allowed them to continue to have curative treatments, said Joanne Spetz, a professor at the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco. Other hospice programs require participants to cease disease-modifying treatment.

Spetz suspects that being able to use both hospice and concurrent care motivated people to sign up for hospice care "because it wasn’t an either/or decision,” she said in a phone interview.
read more here