Pediatric Hospice Care

At some point in your career you have or will encounter a pediatric/adolescent patient with a progressive, slow deteriorating disease with no treatment options, or a severe central nervous systems disability, that predisposes them to an unpredictable death. Regardless of the reason, death for pediatric/adolescent patients should be uncomplicated and pleasant. The problems often seen are the inability of health care facilities and health care provider’s to understand and comply with the wishes of these dying patients. Denying those wishes tend to complicates the death experience and imprints a negative experience on the family. According to Donnelly, “there is evidence that dying in a hospital is not always a good experience” (Donnelly & Dickson, 2013, p.732).
My PICOT question centers on this phenomenon: If adolescent patients receive hospice care from a hospice organization that specializes in pediatric hospice opposed to hospice care from a non-pediatric hospice company, will it result in a higher quality of care before death? The article written by Ito et al., “Good Death for Children with Cancer: A Qualitative Study embodies this phenomenon and describes the needs of terminally ill pediatric/adolescent patients.
Interventions
For the most part many activities for terminally ill pediatric/adolescent patients …show more content…
My current employer, Vitas Healthcare is a private hospice, non-governmental, for profit nationwide corporation that operates 49 hospice programs in 16 states and the District of Columbia (Vitas, n.d.). Although we service a variety of clients, we do not offer specialized pediatric hospice services. This is an underdeveloped area within my organization. Thus, implementing a specialized branch of service that caters to pediatric/adolescents patients could exponentially increase business and provide pediatric/adolescents with a good