Basic hospice strategies can make last days of dying inpatients more comfortable and dignified

There is much value in training hospital and nursing home staff in the basics of palliative care to make the last days of a dying patient’s life as comfortable and dignified as possible. So says F. Amos Bailey of the Birmingham Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the US. Bailey is the leader of a study¹ that saw the benefits of introducing palliative care strategies, typical of hospices, within the setting of Veterans Affairs Medical Centers. Although conducted with US veterans in mind, their findings can have a wider impact, as most Americans will eventually die within the inpatient setting of a hospital or nursing home. The study appears in the Journal of General Internal Medicine², published by Springer.