Development and Organisational Leadership

Running head: FINAL PROJECT
Final Project on Advanced Role Development and Organisational Leadership
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author’s Note:

1FINAL PROJECT
Executive Summary
The report aims to understand the issue related to limited access to Medicare hospice service
to patients requiring palliative care and recommending strategies to address the issue. The
hospice service is associated with Medicare and is one of the major medical insurance
services in the U.S. It is offered to patient and family suffering from a catastrophic or
terminal illness and thus, have a life expectancy of less than six months certified by the
doctors. From various studies, it had been understood that the issue is contributed due to a
number of factors that are interlinked and thus, present complexity in its context. The
understanding of the hospice policy stated that it has a regulatory barrier, the stigma
associated with adopting the service, limitation to the Medicare program, adversarial
regulatory enforcement and barriers of the hospital setting that led to such an impactful issue
in the medical sector. Therefore, steps need to be taken from governmental as well as non-
governmental parties to address the issue and offer the best possible care to those who have a
limited lifespan.

2FINAL PROJECT
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Contextual Analysis of the issue................................................................................................3
Literature Review and Analysis of the issue..............................................................................4
Recommendations......................................................................................................................6
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................7
Reference....................................................................................................................................9

3FINAL PROJECT
Introduction
Palliative care is a kind of treatment approach that focuses on helping people
suffering from terminal disorders as well as their families in order to maintain the quality of
life. It is a part of hospice care that support people with a lifespan of six months or less that is
grounded on the needs and objectives of a patient as well as independent prognosis.
According to the study, Medicare and other insurers offer the hospice services in the country
through a model that is established, and there are 45% of Medicare beneficiaries that enrols
for the service whereas, 55% of people do not (Kim et al., 2015). There are multifaceted
aspects related to the complex issue; thus, patient access to Medicare Hospice services is
limited in nature. The aim of the report is to analyse the concern of limited access to the
hospice service by the patients and their family from all possible perspectives by conducting
an in-depth study and recommending strategies to improve the accessibility.
Contextual Analysis of the issue
The hospice care in the US is a type of last days of life care that particularly emphases
on offering palliative care to the people that are suffering from a terminal illness. The
symptoms of such illness include physical, spiritual, emotion and social. According to the
study of Smith et al., (2014), the concept of hospice was evolved with respect to treating of
an incurable disease in the 11th century and was introduced in the US in the 1970s due to
work conducted by Cicely Saunders in the UK. With the help of the medical practices that are
usually demarcated by the Medicare system, which is a social insurance program along with
other health insurance companies, hospice is given to the people of the US diagnosed with
terminal disorder belonging to any age and is medically stated to live for a period of fewer
than six months. Nearly 1.49 million beneficiaries of Medicare had enrolled for hospice care
for at least one day or more in the year 2017, which indicates an increase of 4.5%, and there