Palliative care and hospice services are available at diagnosis of serious illness and for persons with a terminal prognosis of 6 months respectively, however, many patients are not offered these services or are referred late. Investigators studying hospital discharges of the American Heart Association Get with the Guidelines-HF registry reported similar findings. Of the 121,990 heart failure patients aged ≥65 years discharged from the hospital between 2005-2014, only 3.8% were discharged to hospice. Median survival time on hospice was 11 days with 34.1% in facilities and 12.2% at home dying within 72 hours.
Link to: Medscape summary (9/2018) JAMA Cardiol abstract (8/2018)
