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November is National Hospice Month; a month in which the nation’s attention should be on the wonderful care and support hospice organizations provide to dying people and their loved ones.  Unfortunately, this month we are still reeling from Time magazine’s October 25^th article, No One is Coming: Hospice Patients Abandoned at Death’s Door.

I have dedicated my professional life to working in hospice care, to helping people and organizations be their best, and the vast majority of hospices strive every day to do just that. But for those whose experiences of neglect and unanswered phone calls are the basis of the Time article, our track record and good intentions mean nothing.

In response to the piece, the President and CEO of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization Edo Banach wrote in part in his letter to the membership, “…The authors cite 3,200 complaints filed with state officials in the past five years.  During that period,...

For most people, death is something that happens at the periphery of their lives – but some of us choose to make it the focus of our careers. I knew early on I wanted to care for the sick, but my path to caring for the dying was more circuitous.

As a kid I was given a book on how to take a pulse.  I loved learning to feel the beat under the skin on my wrist.  I asked for the “Visible Woman” for my 10^th birthday and to my delight she was delivered, complete with the optional pregnancy parts. My path was set; after high school, I decided to get an AA degree and then transfer to University of Florida for my Bachelors Degree in Nursing.

My first real job as a RN was on a medical surgical floor in the local hospital where I had the responsibility of caring for patients following surgery. One of my patients was Mr. Green, who’d had surgery for lung cancer and was in and out of the hospital. In those days there was little to be done for people with...

In hospice, your only product is service, and nothing is more important to that than proper staffing. No matter how powerful your mission statement is or how beautiful your facility, your people have to be service-oriented and fully committed to the work. Hospice doesn’t run on a nine-to-five, five-day week; it’s 24/7, and we can never be less than our best. We deal daily with the dying and the grieving, and that means that everyone, from the social worker to the nurses’ aide to the bookkeeper, has to be emotionally stable and mature enough to handle that.

     What do you look for in a potential hire? My first priority in doing executive searches for clients today is the same as it was when I was hiring as an hospice Executive Director; I look for people who have a belief in something greater than themselves. I don’t mean religion necessarily, but faith in goodness, faith in humankind, faith in the rightness of the universe. People who...