Oxford American handbook of hospice and palliative medicine

In the United States, hospice and palliative medicine has emerged as a new subspecialty recently recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties. During the last 10 years, there has been a very signifi cant increase in the number of inpatient and outpatient palliative care programs as well as a major increase in the number of patients who access hospice for end-of-life care.
Unfortunately, educational efforts are lagging behind, and the vast majority of medical students, residents, and even fellows receive minimal palliative medicine education in the United States. However, these junior physicians along with a number of busy clinical specialists are exposed to patients with progressive incurable illnesses and their families on a daily basis.
The purpose of this Handbook is to provide up-to-date, practical, and concise information to health-care professionals delivering care to patients requiring hospice and palliative care in the United States. This includes physicians, nurse practitioners, fellows, residents, and students. All the chapters are aimed primarily at the clinical and administrative arrangements within the American health-care system, including the hospice Medicare benefit.
We believe this book will provide rapid access to most of the daily bedside clinical and administrative needs, and we hope it will help our colleagues in the delivery of excellent palliative and hospice care. We would like to acknowledge the authors of each of the chapters for having committed their time and effort to our joint project. We would also like to acknowledge the commitment to excellence by Oxford University Press and in particular Andrea Seils, our Senior Editor, for the excellent work in coordinating our book. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the
daily effort of health-care professionals who have contributed by their daily clinical work, education, and research to the development of the extraordinary body of knowledge that we have had the privilege to synthesize in this book.