Background
pain, ill
Hospice care focuses on the quality of life and comfort of a person who is facing the end of life and on their family caregivers [To combine the benefits of both inpatient hospices and palliative medicine at a university hospital, i.e., humanitarian aspects and high-tech medicine, the integration of both seems self-evident. These affiliations allow university hospitals to further end-of-life care by expanding its continuum of care. Palliative care patients could benefit from such a unit, as it can be challenging to transfer palliative care patients after medical stabilization in due time to a hospice so this makes for an easy, timely, and seamless transition. To the best of our knowledge, there are only five university inpatient hospices worldwide. Jegier et al. [However, these joint units also raise several concerns that need to be addressed. First, it is of utmost importance to understand the concepts of a hospital, palliative care unit and a hospice. It seems particularly challenging to interweave them as a palliative care unit at a hospital primarily focuses on anticipating, preventing and treating symptoms experienced by seriously ill patients while the perspective of the volunteer hospice civic movement might fade into the background. Second, patients admitted to a university hospital often have a more acute symptomology and greater needs for pain and symptom management, while people in a hospice need qualified nursing/psychosocial care and support with dying [To explore clinical staff’s and volunteers’ expectations and concerns of the first university inpatient hospice in Germany, we conducted semi-structured interviews and handed out short questionnaires at the Department of Palliative Medicine of the University Hospital in Cologne, Germany. These findings will contribute to the development of a suitable concept prior to the implementation of the planned unit. To the best of our knowledge, an inpatient university hospice does not yet exist in Germany and this is the first prospective qualitative study of such a unit.