Hospice underused in Illinois, experts point to ‘death-defying

In a cure-oriented culture, patients are not accessing hospice earlier because some doctors view it as a last resort, said Hughes, who is also co-director of the Center for Research on Health and Aging at UIC.

“Sometimes physicians have difficulty having a frank discussion with patients and their families about the fact that future efforts really are futile,” Hughes said. “It sets it up for death to be seen as failure as opposed to a natural sequence of events.”

But that shouldn’t be the case in the future as more medical schools incorporate end-of-life curricula, according to Dr. Joshua Hauser of the Buehler Center for Aging, Health & Society at Northwestern University.

“There’s a growing familiarity with dying among nurses, students, residents and health care providers,” Hauser said.

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~ by kingstonstone on June 30, 2008.