Literature Review

New report details financial, emotional toll of Parkinson’s on family caregivers McKnights Home Care; by Foster Stubbs; 2/4/25 A new report sheds a light on the unique challenges faced by family caregivers who care for loved ones with Parkinson’s disease (PD). The report, Parkinson’s Disease Caregiving in the US, features insights from secondary analysis and supplementary interviews with 10 PD caregivers. These caregivers average 31 hours of unpaid care per week; half of interviewed caregivers exceed 100 hours each week, according to the report. The National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC), with support from The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF) and Arcadia University, released the report.  

No one should die alone. A Cape Fear Valley initiative aims to make that true for patients The Fayetteville Observer, Fayetteville, NC; by Lizmary Evans; 2/5/25 No one should take their last breath alone, and the mission of a new volunteer group at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center will make sure that doesn't happen. The No One Dies Alone program, an internationally recognized initiative that began in 2001 at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, Oregon, provides trained companions to sit with dying patients who do not have loved ones available during their final moments, according to a news release. ... "Sitting at the bedside of another human being, keeping awake and alert — it’s a vigil," [Mary Draughn, the hospice patient care manager at Valley Hospice House in Fayetteville] said last week. "This vigil provides comfort, meaning, resolution and peace to both the dying person and the companion."

ASCO updates Guidelines for Ovarian Cancer Cancer Therapy Advisor; by Jen Smith; 2/4/25 The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) has updated its guidelines on neoadjuvant chemotherapy use in patients with newly diagnosed, stage III-IV epithelial ovarian, fallopian tube, or primary peritoneal cancer. The guideline authors used data from 61 studies to provide recommendations. ... [Click here for the research article.]

Oncologists overtreat patients at end of life: “There’s a real deficit in our training”Oncology News Central; by Nathan I. Cherny, Robert A. Figlin; 1/29/25When it comes to end-of-life care for patients with cancer, “I think that there is a real deficit in our training,” says Nathan I. Cherny, MD, director of the Cancer Pain and Palliative Medicine Unit at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, Israel. Dr. Cherney and colleagues recently examined factors contributing to oncologists overtreating patients at the end of life. He discusses key findings and ways to address this continued problem with Robert A. Figlin, MD, the Steven Spielberg Family Chair in Hematology-Oncology at the Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center in Los Angeles. “When one reads practice guidelines, they never include a section of when further treatment is more likely to be harmful than helpful,” Dr. Cherny notes. “Unless it appears in every illness guideline, the message does not necessarily get through that this is something that is really important.”

Palliative care slashes ED visits, hospitalizations in people living at home with dementia: study McKnights Long-Term Care News; by Kristen Fischer; 1/30/25 A program that provides palliative care to people with dementia and their caregivers lowered the number of emergency department visits and hospitalizations by approximately half in about a year, a new study shows. Those who benefitted the most from the Indiana Palliative Excellence in Alzheimer Care Efforts (IN-PEACE) initiative were Black people and those with lower incomes. A report detailing the findings was published in JAMA ... The 50% decrease in emergency department visits and hospitalizations among people who received the intervention shows that the program can keep some people with dementia out of the hospital, where they can develop complications and functional declines.

16 states where virus activity remains high: 5 updates Becker's Clinical Leadership; by Alexandra Murphy; 1/27/25 The CDC is reporting high levels of respiratory virus activity across the U.S. While respiratory syncytial virus levels are beginning to peak in many areas of the country, flu-related emergency department visits are at very high levels and are still rising, according to the latest data. Thirteen states are experiencing "high" respiratory virus activity: Texas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Minnesota, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Hawaii and Washington, D.C. Three states are experiencing "very high" levels: New Hampshire, New Jersey and Wisconsin. [Click here for the CDC's "Respiratory Virus Activity Levels," with more detailed data and maps for all 50 states.]

‘Small but significant’ keys to amplifying hospice grief support Hospice News; by Holly Vossel; 1/29/25 Grief support service lines can be an important pathway for hospices to reach communities outside of their patient populations. Building strong bereavement programs comes with myriad considerations around community outreach, collaboration development and strategic planning. ... Similar to many hospices nationwide, Angela Hospice offers bereavement services to its hospice patient families and across communities throughout its service region. The hospice provider’s bereavement program includes one-on-one counseling sessions, group therapy, as well as education and informative online and in-person workshops. Angela Hospice additionally offers an annual summer grief camp for children, Camp Monarch. Editor's note: The CMS Hospice Conditions of Participation (CoPs) require each hospice to provide bereavement/grief support patients' families, both before the death and after. The CMS Hospice CoPs identify "bereavement" and/or "grief" 155 times. 

The iatrogenic consequences of medicalising grief: Resetting the research agenda Sociology of Health & Illness: by Sarah Gurley-Green, Lisa Cosgrove, Milutin Kostic, Lauren Koa, and Susan McPherson; published 11/28/25, distributed via Evermore 1/28/25When the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) was published in 2013, there was a firestorm of controversy about the elimination of the bereavement exclusion. Proponents of this change and of the proposed “complicated grief” designation believed that this change would help clinicians recognise major depression in the context of recent bereavement. Other researchers and clinicians have raised concerns about medicalising grief. In 2022 “prolonged grief disorder” (PGD) was officially included in the DSM-5-TR in the trauma- and stressor-related disorders section. ... As human rights activists have argued, bereavement support is an inalienable human right, one that is centered on the right to health and well-being, for “bereavement health is as intrinsic to our humanity as any other aspect of health and citizenship” (Macaskill 2022). That is why there are increasing calls for investing in bereavement as a public good and for “cultivat[ing] a bereavement-conscious workforce.” (Lichtenthal et al. 2024, e273). As Lichtenthal notes, it is not only clinicians but also institutions and systems that must “shift bereavement care from an afterthought to a public health priority.”Editor's note: "Iatrogenic" refers to unintentional consequences/condition from a medical intervention. In the hospice context, this means bereavement/grief from the hospice death. How many patients do you serve? The CMS Hospice Conditions of Participation identify "bereavement" and/or "grief" 155 times. What priority do you give to bereavement care before, at and after your patients' deaths?

Palliative care may improve quality of life in esophageal cancer Cure; by Tim Cortese; 1/27/25 Palliative care consultations helped patients with esophageal cancer at end-of-life experience better quality of life and less financial strain by reducing the need for intensive interventions, according to a poster presented at the 2025 ASCO Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium. The mean length of hospital stay was 7.5 days (plus or minus 11.3 days) for patients who received palliative care and 8.9 days (plus or minus 14.9) for those who didn’t; and total charges were $97,879 (plus or minus $195,868) and $146,128 (plus or minus $321,830), respectively. Patients who received palliative care consultation had a Charlson Comorbidity Index of 9.4 (plus or minus 3.3) versus 9.1 (plus or minus 3.5) for patients who did not.

Caring for a dying spouse at the end of life

Children’s book written by Manheim Township mother finally published 3 years after she died of cancer [video] LNP Lancaster Online, Lancaster, PA; by John Walk; 1/27/25 As she battled a rare sarcoma cancer over the last two years of her life, Manheim Township resident Ginny McCreary struggled to find a children’s book she could read to her two young daughters to help them better understand what she was going through. So McCreary wrote the book herself, sometimes on a smartphone while laying in bed late at night, ... McCreary died Aug. 15, 2021. She was 34. She left behind a self-published manuscript of the children’s book that sat idle for about two years but was not forgotten. ... The book has also made its way inside four Hospice & Community Care locations in Lancaster as well as Penn Medicine’s Ann B. Barshinger Cancer Institute in East Hempfield Township. [Video with Ginny's mother] "I'd love to get it to some cancer centers and hospice centers ..." [Click on the title's link for more information.]

Engaging the hospice community in end-of-life care in prisons (Part 2)ehospice; by Barry R. Ashpole; 1/21/25Part 1 offered a broad overview of the potential role community hospices can play to improve end-of-life care (EoLC) for a particularly vulnerable and underserved population. As has been widely acknowledged, prisons and correctional facilities are caught between the proverbial “rock and a hard place,” between issues of security and public safety and the civil rights of the prison inmates to healthcare comparable to what is available to the populace-at-large. Part 2 takes a closer look at specific initiatives by some community hospices to support prison inmates towards the end of life. Prior to conducting research for its 2020 report, ‘Dying Behind Bars: How can we better support people in prison at the end-of-life,’ Hospice UK had only anecdotal evidence of the important work that some hospices were engaged in to support prison inmates at the end of life. The scope of this support had not been established at a national level. After conducting a survey of hospice services across England, researchers found that 25 hospices – representing approximately 15% of hospices in the country – are indeed providing this care and support, working with 34 different prisons.Publisher's note: Also see: Engaging the hospice community in end-of-life care in prisons (Part 1) that was also discussed in Hospice News' Global challenges persist in bringing hospice care to incarcerated populations.