Dying in community: The black church and hospice care

The American hospice movement is thriving. Forty-two percent of all Americans who died in 2010 were in hospice care—up from 22 percent in 2000. The number of organizations providing hospice care has grown steadily, up 13 percent from 2006—from 4,500 to over 5,000—as has the length of time that patients spend in hospice care. More people are spending their dying days experiencing the holistic medicine and dignified care that hospice seeks to provide.

But the growth in the hospice movement has tended to neglect African Americans. African Americans constitute 13 percent of the U.S. population, but only 8 percent of hospice patients are African American—even though blacks have the highest cancer rates of all ethnicities and are more likely to die from cancer than whites.

In recent studies on ethnicity, race and death, researchers found that blacks are only half as likely as whites to have advanced-care plans. Blacks are almost twice as likely as whites to choose “full-code” status—that is, they are more likely to request that all medical means be used to preserve their lives. Blacks are also half as likely to opt for withdrawal of life support when faced with a terminal illness.