With more than 1.4 million Americans receiving hospice care every year, the demand for high-quality end-of-life care is only projected to rise in years to come. In Minnesota, a “death-positive” movement is to thank, experts say.
The number of hospice patients in Minnesota has tripled since 2000 and currently accounts for more than half of all deaths in the state, according to an article in the Saint Paul-based Pioneer Press.
While the aging population is growing rapidly, a broader cultural shift is also largely to credit: More doctors are encouraging and accepting of hospice, more mediums are portraying it positively, and more people are discussing and planning for end of life.
“There is a huge death-positive movement happening now,” Christin Ament, organizer of Death Cafes in the Saint Paul area, told the Pioneer Press.
Death Cafes are just one example. Created in 2004, the concept is to offer a place for people to eat, drink and talk about death. Beyond Minnesota, thousands of death cafes are currently operating in more than 60 countries worldwide.
Similarly, the spike in hospice use transcends any one state. Hospice admissions and utilization in the U.S. continued to rise in the second quarter of 2018, according to the latest trends report from Atlanta-based analytics and metrics firm Excel Health.
Experts say the biggest reason for the shift is a change in attitude among doctors, according to the Pioneer Press. Traditionally, doctors have focused on lengthening life by whatever means necessary, opting for curative care as opposed to services more closely aligned to patient comfort.
“At times, you were fighting against what the body wanted to do,” Lindsey Pelletier, a hospice nurse who formerly worked in intensive-care units, told the Pioneer Press. “At times, you were doing something unnatural.”
But now, hospitals have entire teams focused on palliative care, and doctors respect that high-quality end-of-life care is sometimes best for terminal patients.
In addition to making patients’ final days more comfortable, hospice care has also been shown to save money by curbing overall health care spending. With health care costs rising at an unsustainable rate, hospice costs only a fraction compared to many alternatives.
For example, intensive care bills from hospitals can cost thousands of dollars per day, while daily Medicare reimbursement for hospice is $180.
Besides death cafes, the international rise of “death doulas” is also emblematic of the death-positive cultural shift. A type of end-of-life care expert, a death doula carries out a dying person’s plan for how and where he or she wants to die, while also providing spiritual guidance and holistic support.
Some hospice companies have even begun to work with professionally licensed doulas as a way to separate themselves from competitors. On a high level, baby boomers are partially to thank to the the shifting perception of death, experts say.
“My particular demographic is a take-charge-of-my-own-life kind of demographic,” Synthia Cathcart, Compassus’ vice president of clinical development and education, previously told Home Health Care News. “We see more and more openness about, when there isn’t another option given, really embracing that stay-at-home, quality-of-life conversation.”
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