In the United States, hospice care is a type and philosophy of end-of-life care which focuses on the palliation of a terminally ill patient's symptoms.
The U.S. hospice movement was founded from the nurse, Florence Wald, Dean of the Yale School of Nursing, having been inspired by Dame Cicely Saunders of St. Christopher’s, London. She based her model on the work being done by Dr. Cicely Saunders in palliative care at St. Christopher’s Hospice in London, England, in the 1960s. In 1971, Hospice, Inc. was founded in the United States, the first organization to introduce the principles of modern hospice care to that country, where medical care had focused on fighting illness through hospital stays. Throughout the 1970s, the philosophies of hospice were being implemented throughout the United States. The first hospice in the U.S. opened in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1974.
In 1982, Medicare, the social insurance program in the United States, added hospice services to its coverage. US President Ronald Reagan, at the request of the Senate, proclaimed the week from November 7 to 14, 1982 National Hospice Week. Since then, the hospice industry has expanded rapidly. We must also keep in mind that this growth was accompanied by the AIDS epidemic and the aging of the population, as well as concomitant other viral serious diseases.
The first hospital-based palliative care consultation service developed in the US was the Wayne State University School of Medicine in 1985 at Detroit Receiving Hospital. The first US-based palliative medicine and hospice service program was started in 1987 by Declan Walsh at the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center in Cleveland, Ohio.
By 1998, there were 3,200 hospices operating or under construction in the United States and Puerto Rico, according to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO).