When a person nearing the end of their life enters hospice care, their hospice agency’s doctors may prescribe a “comfort kit” of small amounts of medications that their caregivers can give them in case of urgent, distressing symptoms. A new U-M study shows massive variations in which hospice patients actually get two types of powerful medications often included in these kits and the variation has more to do with location than the medical condition. Lauren Gerlach, D.O., M.S., the Michigan Medicine geriatric psychiatrist who led the study, shares additional insights from the research.
