EDITORIAL Staying Connected to Hospice Patients

When I was assigned to review the article that is published in this issue1 I was still ruminating about the hospice deaths of family members of two of my friends—one I had observed and the other told to me. In both instances there were questions about the appropriateness and timeliness of the referral to hospice and how facts other than the clinical con-ditions of the patients might have affected the pro-cess. In one instance referral occurred abruptly at the end of a family conference with physicians in the patient’s hospital room. When the patient chose not to undergo recommended palliative surgery for cancer of the colon, the unexpected response to that choice was same-day dismissal of the patient t