Are Physicians Ethically Obligated to Address Hospice as an Alternative to "Usual" Treatment of Advancing End-Stage Disease?

Hospice care is ideally suited to meet the psychosocial and spiritual needs of dying patients, providing the opportunity to settle financial, property, and inheritance issues; to mend lacerations in important lifetime relationships, including forgiving and asking forgiveness; and to assure a degree of autonomous control over the environment and the social and spiritual processes that attend one's death. Physicians are not only imprecise in prognosticating a patient's time to die, they tend to be over-optimistic in their predictions. A "no" answer to the question, "Would I be surprised if this patient died in the next year?" is a reasonable starting-point for discussing hospice care as a potential treatment plan, now or in the future. Physicians have a duty to present palliative care in hospice as an alternative to the recurrent hospital interventions that are typical in the last six to 12 months of life tor patients who are failing and have declining prospects for one-year survival.