My Aunt Rose, Chocolate Chip Cookies and a Conversation that Changed Our Relationship BY CRAIG KLUGMAN, Ph.D. When you are an ethics student writing your dissertation on end of life issues, you talk to a lot of people about what they hope for in their final days. In my immediate family, this was a fairly […]
Aging Responsibly and with Purpose BY SUSAN M. MATHEWS, PhD, RN, MSBE Incredibly, the old will soon outnumber the young. According to projections just released by the Census Bureau, the population of Americans 65 and older will exceed the number of children in 2035 for the first time in history. Additionally, this year’s prime-age workforce—ages […]
For the 86 percent of Americans who say they want to die at home, hospice programs make that desire increasingly possible. However, people often wait too long before seeking hospice care. In the United States, the average length of hospice care is less than 60 days. About 30 percent of those who elect hospice care […]
Getting On, an HBO workplace comedy set in a women’s geriatric clinic, features a director of medicine who collaborates with a hospice to provide bed space for the dying. The arrangement is lucrative, and it helps support the dubious research studies of the physician, Dr. Jenna James. She becomes greedy, though, and begins to enroll […]
BY SUSAN M. MATHEWS, PhD, RN, MSBE More than 1.4 million Americans live in nursing homes; two-thirds of whom are primarily covered by Medicare and Medicaid. They are our frail elderly, disabled, medically compromised, and cognitively impaired who are at risk because they cannot care for themselves. According to NPR, when Medicaid is the primary […]