Lack of Staff, Guidelines Build Hurdles for Hospice Bereavement Care Programs

Hospices face significant challenges in fully supporting bereaved families due to financial and staffing constraints. The industry-wide labor shortage has further impacted bereavement care, which remains underfunded. Dr. Dawn Gross, a palliative care physician at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Health and medical director at ANX Hospice Care, emphasizes that hospices lack sufficient reimbursement to maintain dedicated grief care teams. Typically, chaplains, social workers, and sometimes clinical psychologists or therapists provide bereavement services. Dr. Gross advocates for expanding bereavement skills across interdisciplinary team members, including clinicians, enabling them to directly bill for these crucial services and share insights from patient and family assessments and interdisciplinary team meetings.