Customer Reviews

Hospice and Palliative Care Handbook: Quality, Compliance, and Reimbursement

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This book is directed at home health based programs who also care for the terminally ill.
It is not specific to hospice care under medicare reembursement. It is of little use to nurses working in hospice care and at times is very inappropriate in its advice for the care of terminally ill patients.

This handbook is a must have for any nurse who is working in hospice. The book is clear, easy to read and apply to your practice.

Having over ten reference books of Hospice nursing in my library, I too felt this book was inadequate for its' intended audience. I also lay issue with companies that are Hospice AND Home Health. IMHO, a company can be satisfactory at both, but excel at neither. After twelve years of specializing in only the field of Hospice nursing, I still fall back to my symptom management books by Peter Kaye, MD. While most physicians and nurses were deciphering algorythms, Dr. Kaye was setting the standard. I am proud to say I cut my teeth on his first Hospice pocket guide. Reading and studying this book alone, I was able to pass the CHPN the first time it was offered. I have since purchased other guides on Hospice care, but still referred back to Dr. Kaye. When my copy fell apart, I was thrilled to see that he had written the 'A-Z Pocketbook of Symptom Management' which is just as informative and still includes the favorites such as true Hospice emergencies, pain control, description and analysis of most of the types of cancer, etc. Why try to reinvent the wheel when Dr. Kaye has perfected it.

I am the Adminstrator of a Hospice and Home Health Agency and recently bought this book for our staff to use on a routine basis. To date I have had nothing but positive comments from the staff on its comprehensiveness and its ease of use. Despite the fact that I am an administrator and not a clinical person, I found the book easy to read and excellent in providing critical clinical and administrative detail to help in the day-to-day and moment-to-moment issues that we deal with in Hospice.