Hospice, Inc.

Evelyn Maples’ last day as a hospice patient wasn’t anything like her family imagined when the nurse from Vitas Healthcare first pitched the service two months before.       

On the morning of Dec. 31, 2011, Maples’ daughter, Kathleen Spry, found her mom unconscious and gasping for breath, with her eyes rolled back in her head. Maples was at a Vitas inpatient facility on Merritt Island, 30 miles from the home the two women shared on Florida’s east coast. No one from Vitas had called to warn the family that the woman everyone called “granny” was in sharp decline, Spry said. No one from Vitas had sought treatment for the blood infection that had made her severely ill, despite the family’s standing request that she receive life-saving care in the event of a crisis.

Frantic and near tears, Spry called her son, David Dunn, who demanded an ambulance. Maples was taken to a nearby hospital, where she recovered from the infection. But her fragile health was permanently compromised, her family claims. She died a month later.
     
But Maples’ family claims she never belonged on hospice, and that she was recruited for the purpose of inflating the company’s Medicare billings.

Hospices exist to provide comfort to people who doctors determine are at the end of their lives, with six months or less to live. The paramount objective, according to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, a trade association, is to make patients comfortable, with a focus "on enhancing the quality of remaining life."
      
In a complaint letter to the Florida attorney general, Dunn alleges the company enrolled his grandmother “for the sake of billing the government for payment for their own financial gain.” The company misled the family about the purpose of hospice — emphasizing benefits such as at-home nursing care and free medications, without explaining that hospices don’t provide curative treatments, according to Dunn. Once enrolled, Dunn alleges, Vitas gave Maples a powerful cocktail of drugs against the family’s wishes, and repeatedly bumped her up to the most intrusive and expensive levels of care.
     
The final straw was the apparent confusion over Maples’ “full code” status. It’s a designation rarely seen in hospice, because it means the family wants the kind of life-saving treatment that hospices don’t provide.

Full Article and Source:
Hospice, Inc

See Also:
Hospice Patients Alliance