Research Project 2 Hospices in Your Community

Santrock indicates that most people die in hospitals, but that increasingly people are turning to hospices as a context in which to die. Is this happening in your community? Find out by determining whether there are hospices in your community. These may be located within hospitals or adjacent to them; or they may be found in nursing homes or nursing care centers.

Once you have found one or more hospices, learn as much as you can about it. What is the nature of the group that runs it? How does the hospice serve the needs of the dying person and the person's family? Does the hospice do anything to teach about the meaning of death to the person who is dying and people close to that person? What services does the hospice provide for the survivors?

Another line of inquiry concerns social policy that affects the hospice. For example, hospitals cannot be reimbursed for providing long-term care for dying patients. Thus, important questions to ask concern the impact of medicare, medicaid, and private insurance payments. How does this relate to who can afford hospice care? Who does use the service? What type of hospice care would local groups provide if governmental police and financial constraints did not limit them?

Summarize your findings in a brief paper in which you answer at least the questions listed above. Also, comment on how well what you learned coincides with what your text reports about attitudes toward death in the United States. If you can, determine how well the hospice or hospices you locate implement what we know about how well people cope with their own or other individual's deaths,

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