Hospice Timeline

  • Dame Cicely Saunders, who began her work with the terminally ill

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    Important Dates and Events in Hospice

  • Saunders introduced the idea of specialized care for the dying to the United States during a visit with Yale University

  • Florence Wald, then Dean of the Yale School of Nursing, invites Saunders to become a visiting faculty member of the school for the spring term

  • Dame Cicely Saunders creates St. Christopher's Hospice in the United Kingdom

  • Kubler-Ross testifies at the first national hearings on the subject of death with dignity, which are conducted by the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging

  • A U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare task force reports that “the hospice movement as a concept for the care of the terminally ill and their families

  • The Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) initiates demonstration programs at 26 hospices across the country to assess the cost effectiveness of hospice care and to help determine what a hospice is and what it should provide.

  • Congress gives hospices their first increase (20%) in reimbursement since 1986 and ties future increases to the annual increase in the hospital market basket through a provision contained in the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1989.

  • More than 1 million Americans with a life-limiting illness were served by the nation’s hospices in 2004, the first time the million-person mark has been crossed

  • Research published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management reports that hospice patients live an average 29 days longer than similar patient that did not have hospice care

  • Forty years after the creation of Connecticut Hospice, NHPCO and its affiliates celebrate 40 years of hospice care in the US