Unnecessarily Cruel Treatment
I'm writing to provide what my family wish we had known before trusting Gentiva Hospice of Beverly MA with the care of our father. While individual members of the hospice team seemed compassionate at first, my father was dropped suddenly when he replaced his feeding tube after it accidentally fell out. This was cruel treatment of someone at a moment when they were declining rapidly and coming off of life support. It meant that the team that we had thought would be there as he went through extreme and frightening changes at end-of-life just disappeared. And instead of focusing our attention on just caring for our dad, the family had to quickly go look for another hospice provider and put my father in the care of people he'd never met before when he was most vulnerable.
In addition to what was done to my father is how it was done. Not only did they drop him as a patient with no advance notice, they gave him an ultimatum: He either had to give up having a feeding tube immediately, or give up hospice, which was not something that insurance or providers said was necessary.. and Gentiva Hospice themselves said that he wouldn't have to give up his feeding tube when we were first considering them. It was only when he was in the moment of getting it replaced that they surprised us with that news, and they also blamed the patient, saying it was his decision that disqualified him from services, when he didn't do anything except maintain his ongoing status of having a feeding tube. The bottom line is that Gentiva Hospice made the decision to drop a dying patient from their care because they didn't want to have the cost associated with maintaining his feeding tube, even though insurance said it would be covered, and his medical providers strongly recommended he keep the tube for quality of life in his final days. I'm writing this to warn others because, if we had known what they were capable of, we would never have trusted them to be there for something so critical.