Literature Review

Hospice of Santa Barbara’s No One Dies Alone Program ensures that those who are alone and actively dying, have someone at their bedside Santa Barbara Independent, Santa Barbara, CA; by Hospice of Santa Barbara; 9/29/25Hospice of Santa Barbara’s (HSB) No One Dies Alone (NODA) program has partnered with local senior living facilities in Santa Barbara for over a decade, providing compassionate volunteer support to seniors in their final 24 to 72 hours when family or friends are unavailable. Currently, NODA has 21 trained volunteers serving in the program. Before becoming a NODA volunteer, applicants must graduate from a six-week patient care training and serve as a patient care volunteer for a minimum of 9 months before attending a NODA specific training. Most NODA volunteers have been with the program for years and feel a strong commitment to the work they do.

Living with dementia: To improve lives, we need to change how we think and talk about this experience in aging societies EurekAlert! - AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science); peer reviewed publication by The Hastings Center; 9/24/25 To experience or even contemplate dementia raises some of the most profound questions: What does it mean to be a person? How does someone find meaning in life while facing progressive neurological deterioration? ... To improve the lives of our fellow citizens who are living with dementia or providing dementia care, all of us need to pay attention to how we imagine and talk about these interwoven and increasingly common experiences, concludes Living with Dementia: Learning from Cultural Narratives in Aging Societies, a special report published by The Hastings Center for Bioethics. This report responds to calls from health care and social service practitioners for new ways to depict and talk about dementia, a collective term for Alzheimer disease and related dementias. Editor's Note: Click here for free access to multiple articles in this crucial report, such as

Community turns out for Banner's Senior ExposCleveland Daily Banner, Cleveland, TN; by Will Bublitz; 9/19/25 Hundreds of seniors enjoyed the food, door prizes, free samples and information to improve their lives during the Living 55Plus Senior Expo, held Thursday in Wacker Commons at the PIE Innovation Center in Cleveland. This was the sixth year for this popular and free event sponsored by the Cleveland Daily Banner. It was co-sponsored by Bradley Medical Center, Cleveland Utilities, Garden Plaza of Cleveland, Ahlberg Audiology, Companion Funeral Homes and Life Care Center of Cleveland. "The 2025 55Plus Senior Expo was the best expo thus far, with the most vendors and attendees yet," said Joyce Taylor, publisher of the Cleveland Daily Banner. [Vendors included, but were not limited to Adoration Hospice, Hearth Hospice,  and Hospice of Chattanooga.]

Serious falls resulting in hospitalization among Medicare-enrolled nursing home residents, July 2022–June 2023HHS Office of the Inspector General; Report number: OEI-05-24-0018; 9/18/25This OIG data snapshot accompanies the report, Nursing Homes Failed To Report 43 Percent of Falls With Major Injury and Hospitalization Among Their Medicare-Enrolled Residents, OEI-05-24-00180. The snapshot found that between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023, more than 42,000 Medicare-enrolled nursing home residents experienced serious falls resulting in major injury and hospitalization, and 1,911 died during their hospital stays. The data indicated that most residents had known fall risk factors prior to their injuries, and falls were more common among female, older, and short-stay residents. Nursing homes with lower nurse staffing levels and lower quality ratings had higher fall rates. These preventable events reduced residents’ quality of life and cost Medicare and enrollees over $800 million, underscoring the need for stronger fall prevention and quality improvement efforts in nursing homes. 

Senior health, home health & hospice stocks Q2 highlights StockStory; by Kayode Omotosho; 9/10/25 ... Looking ahead, the industry is positioned for tailwinds from an aging population, increasing chronic disease prevalence, and a growing preference for personalized in-home care. Advancements in remote monitoring and telehealth are expected to enhance efficiency and care delivery. However, headwinds such as labor shortages, wage inflation, and regulatory uncertainty around reimbursement could pose challenges. Investments in digitization and technology-driven care will be critical for long-term success. The 7 senior health, home health & hospice stocks we track reported a mixed Q2. As a group, revenues beat analysts’ consensus estimates by 2%.

Lights, camera, act up! Residents get royal treatment during photo sessions McKnights Long-Term Care News, The Brighter Side; by Foster Stubbs; 9/2/25The Village at Incarnate Word in San Antonio is home to approximately 275 older adults, including over 50 retired religious sisters. Some of them have recently found a new calling: modeling. Terri Landez, the community’s director of communications, had seen a news story about the work of Pop of Colors Images and struck up an Instagram friendship with the organization. ... Once they got the go-ahead, Pop of Colors photographers Megan Bowling and Jessica Rodriguez-Green turned the facility’s memory care floor into a photography studio, complete with a variety of royalty-themed props and outfits. Editor's Note: Do you need a smile? This will bring it! Enjoy and share. 

Nursing homes can disrupt ‘rehabbed to death’ cycle with PDPM-based palliative care Skilled Nursing News; by Kristin Carroll; 9/7/25 ... Skilled nursing facilities can leverage the Patient Driven Payment Model (PDPM) to provide more palliative care to people near the end of life, helping to drive value-based care goals while improving the patient experience. However, much more needs to be done on the policy level to disrupt the current status quo, in which people commonly go through several care transitions near the end of life, driving up costs across the health care system while patients receive services that are not aligned with their own goals. Enabling concurrent SNF and hospice care is one change that could lead to improvement. These are assertions in the recent article “Rehab and Death: Improving End-Of-Life Care for Medicare Skilled Nursing Facility Beneficiaries,” published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

The hidden crisis in serious illness care and how we fix itMedCityNews; by Dr. Mihir Kamdar; 9/7/25 Every year, millions of Americans with serious illnesses find themselves caught in a dangerous limbo: not sick enough to qualify for hospice, but far too ill to be served by our traditional healthcare system. The result is care that’s expensive, fragmented, and often traumatic. These patients are shuffled between a revolving door of emergency rooms and ICUs, enduring a cascade of aggressive interventions that don’t match their goals or improve their quality of life. This approach not only undermines quality, it drives healthcare spending through the roof, particularly in the last year of life. This is the hidden crisis in serious illness care. And it’s getting worse. At the root of the problem is what many in the field call the “hospice cliff.” ...

Understanding trauma in the context of direct care work in nursing homesJournal of Applied Gerontology; by Alfred Boakye, Jennifer Craft Morgan, Candace L. Kemp, Antonius D. Skipper; 8/25Direct care workers (DCWs) experience job quality challenges such as heavy workload, low pay, and few benefits. Layered risks such as the COVID-19 pandemic and systemic racism have impacted DCWs, made them more vulnerable, and increased turnover and the precarity of the long-term care system and residents’ care. Findings suggest that DCWs are often crippled with challenges stemming from the impact of COVID-19, work-related factors, and personal factors. Understanding the intersection of trauma provides a detailed contextual description of care work, which is important for developing practical coping strategies, either at the personal or organizational levels, and developing more refined trauma-informed initiatives to build resilience and support DCWs.

Golden Age Manor’s new hospice suite aims to give families comfort in final days Amery Free Press, Amery, WI; by Justin Runberg; 8/28/25 With a ribbon cutting set for Sept. 4, Golden Age Manor’s newly completed hospice suite will soon open its doors, offering families a more home-like space to spend time with loved ones during end-of-life care. In partnership with Adoray Home Health & Hospice, the project has been completed, and an open house will be held for the community to view the new addition. 

Advocate Health investing $3B across rural footprint: 8 things to know Becker's Hospital Review; by Alan Condon; 8/15/25 Charlotte, N.C.-based Advocate Health is investing more than $3 billion across its rural operations to preserve care access, expand services and build a sustainable pipeline of providers for the future. The investment comes at a time when nearly half of rural hospitals are operating at a loss and 800 are at risk of closure, according to an analysis by the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. Twenty-one of Advocate Health’s nearly 70 hospitals are located in rural counties across six states, along with more than 320 rural clinics and a network of mobile and virtual programs [including hospice care]. 

Medicaid payments and racial and ethnic disparities in Alzheimer disease special care unitsThe Journal of the American Medical Association - JAMA Network Open; by Huiwen Xu, PhD, Shuang Li, PhD, John R. Bowblis, PhD, Monique R. Pappadis, PhD, Yong-Fang Kuo, PhD; James S. Goodwin, MD; 8/4/25 In this cohort study of 13, 229 nursing homes, those with higher proportions of Black or Hispanic residents were less likely to have Alzheimer disease special care units. The disparities among nursing homes serving high proportions of Black residents, however, narrowed and even disappeared in states with higher Medicaid payment-to-cost ratios. ... This study suggests that more generous Medicaid payments may be associated with improved availability of specialized dementia care in nursing homes that serve primarily marginalized Black residents.