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Guest Column

Hospice and funeral services don't match

By ANTHONY J. PALUMBO
Published January 8, 2007

Hope Hospice of Southwest Florida recently filed an application seeking licensure to begin offering funeral and cremation services. If successful, this maneuver would have unprecedented statewide and national implications that could change the funeral services industry and the hospice community forever, and not for the better.

Hospice of Citrus County and the state association, Florida Hospices and Palliative Care Inc., have joined together in opposition to such an undertaking by any hospice provider as it fails to address the following issues:

Hospice providers are the experts in serving people at the end of life. We are also experts in serving people who are dealing with an amalgam of issues in grief.

We certainly would not want the funeral services community to step into the hospice and palliative care business and we're certain the funeral services community feels the same way about hospice entering into its area of expertise.

Consider the incongruence that such a marriage of services would produce and the negative impact it would have upon both industries and the consumers served.

Funeral services fall outside of the hospice continuum of care and its primary mission. Hospice is health care. Funeral services are not.

Hospice already maintains ample opportunities to seek new revenue streams toward enhancing operational alacrity, such as ownership of ancillary business units that are slaves to the core mission and continuity of care of hospice.

The negative effect this would have upon the synergistic relationships that have developed between the funeral industry and the hospice community would be profound. Any hospice program enthusiastic to enter the funeral services business has failed to address the ethical considerations that surround such an undertaking.

These relationships have a practical and profound impact upon our consumers. This collaborative partnership would be placed at serious risk at the moment a hospice program was licensed to enter the funeral services arena.

Finally, allowing hospice to enter the funeral services business would dilute that which the hospice community has worked so hard to preserve: a model of care that speaks to the value of quality rather than quantity of life and a philosophy that places mission before the bottom line.

Never does the hospice community wish to be perceived as hastening death in order to reap maximum financial benefit. This would serve to undermine hospices' core mission and values, and presents the potential for operational mischief in the name of maximizing revenue.

We shared our collective opposition with the Board of Funeral, Cemetery and Consumer Services during its recent meeting in Jacksonville and will continue to work with our many friends within the funeral services community toward preserving our respective integrity and mission.

Indeed, it has been due to this broad range of opposition that Hope Hospice has withdrawn its application for licensure.

As the CEO of Hospice of Citrus County and Vice President of Internal Affairs of Florida Hospices and Palliative Care Inc., I assure you that we will remain committed toward preserving the vital degree of separation that exists between the hospice and funeral services community here in Citrus County, statewide and nationally.

Anthony J. Palumbo is the chief executive officer of Hospice of Citrus County and vice president of Internal Affairs for Florida Hospices and Palliative Care Inc. Guest columnists write their views on subjects that they choose, which do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.

[Last modified January 8, 2007, 06:22:57]