Palliative Care

This article is part of a series in The Hospital Leader written by members of the Division of Hospital Medicine at Dell Medical School at The University of Texas in Austin, exploring lessons learned from the coronavirus pandemic and outlining an approach for creating COVID-19 Centers of Excellence. Patients dying without their loved ones, families […]

“We Need Creative Solutions” When I read or hear the sentence above, I think of one thing and one thing only. The solution is long in coming, involves input from multiple parties, has no obvious fix, is costly–in either money or time, and we undergird it by a whopper of a collective action problem. How […]

Last week I was in Dunkin’ Donuts and noticed something odd—although the oddness did not strike me immediately.  The woman who was serving me could have been my grandmother. Ditto that when I was at Home Depot in the lighting aisle yesterday.  And ditto it again in Walmart this morning. I would never dream of […]

You all think you know hospice. You don’t, and I will tell you why. Hospice is a bastard child of the Medicare system. It went live in 1983 as a standalone entity during the Reagan administration and remains a disjointed program today. I would characterize its evolution as such: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. […]

There have been recent discussions in the lay media about a growing trend of litigation cases focused not on the “right to live”, but rather on the “right to die”. These cases have involved patients who received aggressive treatment, despite having documentation of their wishes not to receive such aggressive treatment. Although unsettling, it is […]

How often do we get complacent with knowledge?  We hear the same thing over and over, and the message becomes lore.  Drink eight ounces of water per day or turkey makes you drowsy—not only do we as docs believe it but we tell family members and patients the same. I came across a new study […]