Make Hospice Work for You and Your Family

It is a ten-step program for families going through the hospice experience, delivered as a book and online course. It doesn't replace any clinical or psychosocial service. It gives families a structured, self-paced companion to what your team already does, written by a former medical oncologist with nearly four decades of clinical experience, including hospice. Your staff can refer families to it at admission or at any point afterward, without adding to their own workload.

Much of that anxiety comes from surprise. Families who don't know what to expect at the end of life tend to panic, and the most costly panic response is demanding emergency physician involvement, which strains trust with the care team. Step 3, "Learn the Terrain," prepares families for the changes they will see, so fewer situations look like emergencies. The goal is to give your clinicians calmer families and fewer avoidable escalations.

Yes. Steps 1 and 2, "Name What's Happening" and "Choose to Participate," address the reasons families delay or push back. The program identifies three avoidance patterns: commandeering, disappearing, and belligerence. It also recognizes that false hope and theological resistance often come from the same underlying fear of mortality. Your team gets language and a framework for those conversations, and families are more likely to engage sooner and more fully with the care you offer.

Hospice staff can only be at the bedside for part of the day. Each of the ten steps follows the same FORGE structure (Frame, Orient to Obstacles, Reconstruct, Generate, and a family practice), so families keep working together after your team leaves. The family practices give siblings and caregivers something concrete to do together, and they set out a role for the family instead of leaving them to watch.

The agency licenses the program and offers it to the families it serves. You offer families a distinctive, clinician-written resource that supports your mission of comfort, dignity, and family readiness, at a predictable cost and without building your own family-education curriculum.