|
medpundit |
||
 |
 |
|
Friday, November 22, 2002I read their report. It looks like some sensible people who wrote some overly dramatic eye grabbers that have then become the entire story. Their actual recommendations are mostly ordinary sensible stuff. I suspect it would not have been reported as news if they had simply issued it as an update of recommendations. Almost half the report is eye grabbing excess. The most serious flaw in their hospice section is that they ignore the home hospice effort. I know that locally there is strong pressure to accept home hospice services rather than dedicated hospice rooms. In most cases this is consistent with what the patients want. This leads to a drop in duration for dedicated hospice stay, as is noted in their report. They also are using rather poor statistical methodology. If you want to measure hospices you should measure waiting lists and vacancies. The optimum is no waiting lists, so everyone gets in when they want to, and few vacancies, so money is not wasted on excess construction or operating costs. That’s true about the home hospice programs. Those are very popular with the terminally ill, and they allow people to meet their goal of dying peacefully at home. It's hard to understand why the report would ignore home hospice, unless their goal is to make it seem like the hospice movement is being ignored. The pdf version of the report is here. posted by Sydney on 11/22/2002 08:06:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
|
