The mission of Hospice is to provide quality, safe, and cost effective end-of-life care to persons in need of those services. Hospice provides care that optimizes comfort and dignity and is consistent with patient and family needs and goals, with patient needs and goals as priority. The Vision of hospice is dedicated to the provision of comprehensive, quality, patient-centered care that is focused on each patient and family’s unique needs and palliative care outcomes.
Description
Since the 11th century, the concept of hospice was adopted by the Roman Catholic tradition to refer to a place of hospitality for the sick and dying as well as for travelers and pilgrims. The modern usage of hospice as a place for and philosophy of end-of-life care began with the work of a British physician Dame Cicely Saunders. Dr. Saunders began work with terminally ill patients in London in 1948. In 1963, during a talk at Yale University in the US, Dr. Saunders introduced the idea of specialized care for the dying, which centered on palliative care rather than treatments to cure. In 1967, Dr. Saunders founded St. Christopher’s Hospice in London, the first hospice for terminally ill patients in the United Kingdom. In 1969, Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross published, On Death and Dying. In this book, Dr. Kubler-Ross emphasizes the benefits of home care over treatment in an institutional setting for terminally ill patients and argues that everyone deserves the right to decide about their end-of-life care. In 1986, the Medicare Hospice Benefit was enacted, and states were given the option to include hospice in their Medicaid programs. Hospice care was made available to terminally ill nursing home residents as well. For the next three decades, legislation was passed, funding was improved, and Medicare reimbursement rates were increased, resulting in the proliferation of hospice care providers. In 2017, Virginia Health Services began its hospice program here in Newport News and surrounding areas.
