November Hospice & Palliative Care month- Hospice Myth #2

Hospice being just for CANCER patients has been a long going myth about hospice.  While working in the hospitals I would find that patients would often times be very surprised when their parent with Congestive Heart failure needed hospice-- they were surprised that it was an option!  Myth #2: Hospice is only for people with cancer.

More than 1/5 of hospice patients nation-wide have diagnoses other than cancer. In urban areas, hospices serve a large number of HIV/AIDS patients. Increasingly, hospices are also serving families coping with the end-stages of chronic diseases, like emphysema, Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular, and neuromuscular diseases.