Living with Grief: Improving Dying

Hospice Foundation of America’s 2025 Living with Grief® program highlights interventive, creative, and adjunct evidence-based strategies used to assist dying patients and their intimate networks find meaning, value, and comfort. End-of-life care providers from across the country will share insights into programs such as pet therapy, art and music therapy, and the use of virtual reality, which improve the dying experience, offering patients and their networks enhanced quality care, an improved perception of care, and the amelioration of grief. Hospice providers, in turn, may benefit from satisfied clients, recognition in their communities, and enhanced staff morale.

Objectives:

1. Identify six interventions, therapies, and other initiatives end-of-life care providers are using to enrich patient and family care within and outside of the basic Medicare Hospice Benefit conditions of participation.
2. Explain two ways that each intervention, therapy, or initiative profiled in Improving Dying can potentially enhance patient and family care, satisfaction and wellbeing.
3. Describe three necessary resources needed to organize, implement and provide additional services.
4. Discuss two possible barriers to the provision of additional care interventions, therapies initiatives and how those might be overcome.
5. Give examples of how such initiatives have a positive return on investment, benefiting patients, families, and the community at large, bolstering a provider’s footprint in the community, and increasing provider staff/volunteer retention.