Guides › Care guide
Roughly speaking, hospice is a service that comes to you rather than a place you go. That is its main appeal — and the source of the expectation gap that catches families out.
An interdisciplinary team, visiting on a schedule set by the plan of care: nurses for symptom management, aides for personal care such as bathing, a social worker, chaplain or counselling if wanted, and physician oversight. Medications for the terminal illness, medical equipment such as a hospital bed or oxygen, and supplies are included.
Visit frequency varies with how the patient is doing — typically a nurse once or twice a week early on, rising sharply in the final days. Hospice does not provide a caregiver who stays in the house.
Between visits, day-to-day caregiving falls to family or to privately hired help. For a patient who needs turning, toileting and medication through the night, that is a substantial and unpaid job. Families who plan for it cope; families who assume hospice covers it do not.
If round-the-clock help is needed, the options are private-pay home care, Medicaid programmes in some states, or moving the patient to a facility — where hospice still covers the hospice care but not the room and board.
Every Medicare-certified hospice must make nursing available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for urgent needs. What differs enormously between providers is what that means in practice: a nurse who drives out, or a phone triage line that tells you to wait until morning.
Two published measures speak to this directly, and both appear on every provider page here:
Ask the question directly too: "If my mother is in pain at 3am on a Sunday, who comes, and how long will it take?" Compare the answer with the numbers.
For a patient with Medicare Part A who elects the hospice benefit, the hospice services themselves are covered. The cost sharing that remains is small and specific: a modest copay may apply per prescription for symptom-control drugs, and a share of the cost for inpatient respite care. Room and board is the big exclusion.
Copay caps and coinsurance percentages are set by federal rule and change over time — check Medicare.gov or ask the hospice for its current figures before relying on any number.
No. Hospice provides scheduled visits from nurses, aides and other team members, plus 24-hour on-call nursing for urgent needs. Continuous bedside care is not part of routine home hospice.
The family, Medicaid, or long-term care insurance. The Medicare hospice benefit covers hospice care, not room and board, except during short inpatient respite or general inpatient stays.
It depends on the plan of care and the patient's condition — commonly once or twice a week early on, increasing substantially as the patient declines. Ask each provider what its typical pattern is.
Yes. Hospice can serve a patient wherever they live, including assisted living and nursing facilities. The hospice bills Medicare for hospice care; the facility bills separately for room and board.
Records for 14,690 nursing homes, 5,597 assisted living facilities and 28,152 hospice, home health, dialysis and rehabilitation providers: search by name or city · nursing homes · hospice · home health · dialysis · inpatient rehab · nursing home groups · other ownership groups.
This guide is general information from public sources, not medical, legal, or financial advice. Program rules and dollar figures change annually and vary by state — verify with Medicare.gov, your state Medicaid agency, or a certified elder law attorney before acting.