medical director

[oregon hospicern]

I work at a home hospice company.We have a medical director per medicare requirement.My question is what type of direction do other hospice nurses receive from their medical director.Do you receive advice,help with difficult cases,medication and pain management guidance etc? Thank you

[QuiltDog]

That is how we use our medical directors. Some of our patients have their own physicians, but we often access our physicians for advice/guidance on symptom management. They also act as primary physicians if the patient chooses this route

[DedHedRN]

According to medi-cal regulations even a osteopathic trained person can be a medical director, so I think it would really depend on who you have for a director.

[TammyG]

Yes to all of the above.

[softrbreeze]

Our current medical director allows us to call for orders (when we are unable to get a response from the attending MD), guidance, etc. She is pretty good about working with us, although we don't always get what we want from her. Our previous medical director was an oncologist, and she was pretty good about giving us the orders we requested but we weren't allowed to call her directly. It was a very strange set up- we were instructed to make our requests to our supervisor who would then contact her or write the Rx and fax it to her office. When we would call her office, her staff would often give us "attitude". It was a stressful situation at times. I'm glad she has moved on.