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Hospice Movement and African Americans

Despite the significant growth of the hospice movement in the US in the last two decades of the 20th century, not all American demographic groups have availed themselves of hospice service and facilities for tertiary-stage, or end-of-life, care. In particular, African-Americans, though representing approximately 12 to 13 percent of the US population, reportedly account for only 8 percent of the hospice population (Crawley, et al., 2000), or less than one-tenth the rate of usage of the white non-Hispanic population. Accordingly, this research examines the issue fronts surrounding the subject of why more African Americans do not utilize hospice for the purpose of facilitating end-of-life care for themselves and/or their families.

No meaningful treatment of the reasons for which African Americans, as a demographic group, avail themselves so much less of hospice care can be complete without a sense of the context in which hospice care has evolved in the US in the recent historical period. Though the term originally denoted a travelers' inn, in its medical application hospice has come to describe not only a specific place for medical care but also an entire mode of medical treatment. A home-care hospice can be configured as an outreach program that services people in the home, with contact between medical teams and the primary caregiver who resides in the home; this was the dominant model in the formative phase of hospice care in the US (Asch-Goodkin, 2000). Some hospices are free-standing, which has come to mean the same as residential, or functioning independently from hospital institutions and the contingencies of heroic interventions conducted at the discretion of the institution. However, the benefits of independence are to be set beside the disadvantages of "lack[ing] the support that can be found within the structure of a larger institution" (Asch-Goodkin, 2000, p. 33). Other hospices may be units affiliated with or physically con...

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Hospice Movement and African Americans. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:14, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681247.html