Hospice Care is a topic that has recently been brought to the attention of the medical world.   Simply put, Hospice care is the caring for and treating of people in the final stage of their life.   Hospice seeks to try and ease the passing of a person from this life, helping them to realize the issues surrounding the end of life, and allowing them to die without pain.   It marks a distinct shift from the normally curative focus of medicine to a largely caring one, and it involves an acknowledgement on the part of the patient that further drastic medical interventions will not improve their condition or their quality of life.

The modern health care era that we currently reside in has seen many great accomplishments.   Advancements in both social standards and technological procedures have seen the control and eradication of many diseases that were once major epidemics.   Accompanying this, though, was a shift in the causes of death.   At the turn of the twentieth century, most deaths could be attributed to acute symptoms...diseases were relatively sudden, fast, and fatal.   As we conquered more and more illnesses, people began to live longer.   They also began to suffer from chronic, long term medical issues that require large amounts of constant care.   Most patients in the United States will not die of some sudden infection, but of long term heart disease or cancer.   A new need arose for both an outlet for dealing with these new processes of dying, as well as for allowing for the patients and family to cope.   While hospitals do allow a venue in which to obtain the proper medical care, they still carry a mostly curative focus.   What can a patient do when it is clear that any further medical treatments will not help them, and in fact may make things worse?

Hospice care is a service that works to allow its patients to die "free from pain."   It is not simply physical pain that they work against.   Hospice care also gives the patient the option of dying in their own home.   Many surveys, undertaken by organizations such as the Irish Hospice Foundation and the state of Oregon, have shown that patients would prefer to die in their own homes rather than a hospital room.

"According to the findings, 82% have never told anyone where they would like to be treated if they became terminally ill, e.g. in a hospice, a hospital or at home. This is despite the fact that two-thirds would prefer to die at home.

The reality however is that only one-quarter of people die at home, with the majority dying in hospitals or other care settings" (http://www.irishhealth.com/?level=4&id=6633)