Something to Think About

a blog on end of life

We love sharing helpful info on our blog.

About the BK Team
Slipping Into the Shoes of a  Hospice Patient

How does a person feel as a hospice patient?  Everyone is waiting on them, they are unable to do things for themselves. They have to wear diapers and probably don't want...

When Families Resist Calling In Hospice

Part of "selling" hospice is to create trust and a bond during that first meeting. It takes people skills in addition to knowledge of hospice benefits...

Family Guidance In The Final Hours and After…

In the hours to minutes before death, gather family and significant others. Encourage each person to spend some time alone with the person dying. This is the time to talk...

Supporting a Hospice Patient During Their Life Review

As end of life approaches, people start looking at their life; what they’ve accomplished, not done, who they have touched, interacted with, and the relationships they have or have not built...

I Believe Hospice is About Healing, Building Trust and Educating

All the hours of talking, drinking coffee, and eating homemade pies was time spent healing, building trust, and educating. It wasn’t about blood pressures. It was about people, feelings, and...

Don’t Let A Special Opportunity Get Lost

I believe everyone has the right to be told once that they can’t be fixed. It is the physician’s job to compassionately and honestly give that information...  

Dying Is Not Pretty

People don’t die like they do in the movies. Mom is not going not going to say some profound words, close her eyes and be dead...

Restoring Heart to Hospice: Crafting a Compassionate Orientation

Taking care of someone who is at the end of life is different from taking care of someone who is going to get better, BUT most people don’t know this—-including...

Denial of a Life Limiting Illness

Denial by the person with a life threatening illness, denial by the caregiver, and I’ll even add denial by some attending physicians. Denial is often the reaction to diseases that have...

Establishing a Bond- The Admission Visit

How do we get beyond the social conventions of strangers meeting and getting to know and trust each other in a very short time? From the time we ring the...

Caregivers Need Knowledgeable Guidance

...That caregivers put so much energy, time, love, and concern into taking care of their person that they can become blind to or just plain don’t want to see the...

Using Palliative Sedation At End of Life

When the terminal illness, the disease progression, has been a pain filled experience and all comfort management options have been unsuccessful, then sleep is our friend...

Always Offer, Never Force: Food At End of Life

My husband Jack  has been dead eight months. In processing the five months from his diagnosis to his death, what stands out most for me is the tension that surrounded food....

“Who will take care of us when we can’t take care of ourselves?”

Unfortunately, as death approaches none of us will be able to take care of ourselves. There will come a point when we will need assistance. We probably won’t even be aware we...

Developing a  Cooperative Relationship Between Nursing Facilities and Hospice

For many people, nursing facilities have become their home. It is therefore reasonable that Hospice services be available in facilities. BUT care in a facility is not the same as...

Six Months After My Husband Died

It has been almost six months since my husband of 62 years died. As an end of life educator I have taught about loss and grief, and even wrote a booklet about it. BUT...

How The Body Prepares to Die

Our body is programmed to die. We are born. We experience, and then we die...

Can We Revive the Essence of Hospice?

In the ideal picture, the goal is the patient’s death. Everything that is done before the death is preparation for the actual moment death occurs. Everything after the death gradually eases...

Professional Boundaries With Our Vulnerable Patients

We enter peoples’ lives as professionals. We are knowledgeable, supportive, caring, and personable. However, we are not best friends, we are not even friends, really.

Supporting  Hospice Caregivers and their daily encounters with death

Working with end of life in the medical field often leaves us feeling like outliers. The medical model is to fix people. Working with dying generally isn’t addressed in training. (It’s...

The Difficulties of Being Discharged From Hospice Care

Why is the patient being discharged, you ask? Is it because the patient just didn’t decline as rapidly as expected? Yes, that can be the situation...

1 2 3 10