Nov 20 2012
Several news organizations cover issues related to end-of-life and long-term care.
The Boston Globe: Hospices Trying To Sell The Public On Their Care
People often have one regret about hospice care: that they didn't get it sooner. The hospice system has been caring for terminally ill patients and their families for decades; 42 percent of the 2.4 million Americans who died last year were under hospice care at the end. Now, hospices across the country are trying to rebrand and reposition themselves to reach patients earlier and erase the idea that turning to hospice is akin to "giving up" (Weintraub, 11/19)
ProPublica: The 10 Most Common Nursing Home Violations
[The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] now releases narrative reports of these problems from a home's last three inspection cycles -- or about three years. ProPublica created Nursing Home Inspect to allow users to easily search through the reams of reports, looking for trends or particular problems. ... Nursing homes are inspected annually, called a standard survey, and when there is a complaint. Inspectors typically work for state agencies paid by Medicare. If they find problems, known as deficiencies, they rank them on a scale of A to L, the most severe. The vast majority are either labeled D or E (Ornstein, 11/16).
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 This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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