HOME HEALTH CARE MANAGEMENT & PRACTICE / February 2005 Social Work Update The Home Health Care Team: What Can We Learn

This article briefly describes the history of the development of hospice and home health care and compares and contrasts the policies that govern these two health care delivery systems. The arti-cle articulates how these policies affect the nature of interprofessional collaboration within each milieu. The author makes suggestions for what home health care can glean from hospice care to improve service delivery. Hospice care is recognized as a unique form ofmedical care for many reasons. The primary,distinctive quality of hospice care is that it provides palliative care to the dying. This is often a great contrast to the curative and ameliorative services provided by other points on the medical care contin-uum. Another distinguishing feature of hospice care is the holistic approach to patient and family care. Although the concept of the interdisciplinary team is not exclusive to hospice care, hospice has a reputation of closer collaboration between various disciplines than many other patient care teams. Hospice care has historical roots dating back to medieval times; however, the development of modern hospice care has been attributed to a British physicia