Book Review: The Hospice Team: Who We Are and How We Care
The Hospice Team: Who We Are and How We Care, by Chaim Wender and Patricia Morrison (Eds.), Health Professions Press, ISBN 9781938870835, 2019, 193 pages, $32.99 softcover.
Hospice: a place or a way to die? Hospice is so much more than a place where you go when there are no other alternatives for treatment. It is a system in which support and relief are provided by skilled professionals who understand how a terminal diagnosis can distress both patients and families. Wender and Morrison introduce the reader to the hospice team, comprising nine compassionate professionals from different interdependent disciplines.
The book is organized into eight chapters, each a heartfelt anecdote in accessible language describing the lived experiences of a practitioner, the patient, and the family. The book is also complemented with an introduction and a conclusion, discussion questions, and scenarios, as well as a bibliography.
The opening pages offer a brief history of the hospice movement’s 1967 inception in England’s St. Christopher Hospice, considered a dwelling equally a “hospital and a home.” The first hospice instituted in the United States in 1974 provided a multi-layered view of compassionate care offered by an interdisciplinary group of professionals that reframed the meaning of “hope” in the lives of the patients and those in caregiving roles.
With this, the reader proceeds to read stories told by 21 culturally diverse professionals who represent members of the interdisciplinary team (i.e., physicians, nurses, certified nurse assistants, social workers, chaplains, music therapists, bereavement counselors, volunteers, and integrative therapists) who care for patients and their families. The introduction concludes with an explanation of the acronym TEAM—“Together Everyone Achieves More”—emphasizing that no one is alone, but that strength and healing arise from joint efforts.
Each chapter represents a profession or contributor to the interdisciplinary team. Members of that contributing group share their personal and professional anecdotes related to death and dying and hospice services. Specifically, they share how they collaborate as a team to provide comfort care to enhance quality of life, while meeting the patient’s unique biopsychosocial and spiritual needs from diagnosis to prognosis to death. Each contributor assists families in navigating through the stages of grief. The authors conclude by offering the reader with a list of questions and scenarios to support their understanding of hospice care.
Wender and Morrison’s collection of anecdotes is practical, organized, and well-focused on the interconnectedness of an interdisciplinary team to meet the biopsychosocial and spiritual needs of terminally ill patients and their families. The book can be used as supplemental and supportive material to enhance social work education, practicing social workers, other professionals, and caregivers in their understanding of how an interdisciplinary team collaborates in providing the hospice care needs of patients and families.
Reviewed by Bertha Ramona Saldana De Jesus, DSW, MSW, Assistant Professor of Social Work and BASW Online Coordinator, Millersville University, Millersville Pennsylvania.
