← Chapter 14
Medical-Surgical Nursing II · Chapter 14

How Long? Hospice, the Last Days and What You Say

A family’s memory of a death is shaped almost entirely by whether someone explained mottling, Cheyne–Stokes breathing and the rattle before they happened. Switch on the findings you can see and watch the timeline move, choose the hospice level of care that actually fits the crisis, then pick the sentence you would say — and find out which ones become traumatic memories.
At the bedsideSwitch on every finding you can actually see or measure right now. Green edges are the weeks-out picture, gold the days-out picture, coral the last hours.
Which level of hospice care does this need?
Non-cancer eligibility — pick the diagnosis
The moment
What you say
First: is this a medical examiner or coroner case?Switch on anything that applies. One box changes almost everything you are about to do.
Now handle the body

Where on the trajectory