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Professor Karen Bullock has spent the last two decades studying what stops seriously ill Black patients and their families from getting the care they want in life and in death.
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Quality over quantity. As people get older, their health care goals may shift away from living as long as possible to maintaining a good quality of life.…
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This year, for the first time, Medicare is reimbursing physicians for the time spent discussing patients’ preferences for care at the end of life. For Dr.…
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Beginning next year, the federal government will conduct a five-year, 40-state experiment to determine whether there is a better way to help elderly…
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This Grace Notes essay originally aired on August 30, 2009.Moments before I said goodbye to her family, I had gripped the hand of her brother-in-law as…
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Usually its IV poles being wheeled down hospital hallways. Today, it’s a harp.In the palliative care program at Baylor University Medical Center in…
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I knew that a child had died by the way that she paused and glanced at her husband when I asked “how many children do you have?” She was eighty-four years…
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Starting back in medical school, oncologist Anthony Back observed a disconnect between the way doctors talked to terminal patients about next steps, and…
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A program in Hawaii aims to reduce the number of older people who spend their final days of life in a hospital. Hawaii has one of the highest rates of hospital deaths for those over age 65 in the U.S.
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In a few hours, my patient Dawn would leave the hospital after a stay of nearly six weeks. I wouldn't be surprised when her mother called me a week later…