WARNING
Breeze Hospice never provided the morphine for my mother and she suffered terribly at the end.
Please read this before using Breeze Hospice of Missouri.
Our mother passed in January of 2023. When she was released from the hospital, the hospice process was explained to us (neither me nor my 2 sisters had been through using hospice so we had no experience). Among other things, we were told she would be given liquid Ativan and morphine to keep her comfortable.
Our mother did pretty well for the first 10 days, but on the 11th day she very quickly took a turn for the worse and became very uncomfortable and extremely restless, was experiencing serious shortness of breath, and was letting us know she was in pain.
On the 11th day of our mother being on hospice is when we realized we did not have liquid Ativan or morphine. That day multiple messages and phone calls were sent/made to her attending Breeze nurse and to the pharmacy trying to figure out why we didn't have the drugs we were promised to use at the end. We resorted grinding up Tylenol and making a paste to put under her tongue to try to give her some relief. This prove to be no help at all.
Shortly after trying the Tylenol she passed holding my hand extremely restless, extremely uncomfortable, gasping for air and she had been pointing to her head and saying I can't stand this. At this time I'm fighting back tears telling her we're working to get stronger medicine. Then she was gone.
We were determined to figure out why she didn't have the morphine at the end when she needed it so we spent a good bit of time calling and visiting our local CVS talking to multiple pharmacists. We figured out what happened was Breeze had never provided the codes to the insurance company for payment.
It was not our job to frantically run around at the end trying to figure out where the morphine was. It should have been in the refrigerator ready for us to use and that was Breeze's job and they failed. We learned later from the Missouri department of Health and Senior Services that the morphine should have been in the refrigerator ready for us to use when needed
We were traumatized over this experience and feel all we could do was report the situation to the proper authorities.
After researching, we found out that Livanta (Medicare) and Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services are the two main organizations for this type of complaint.
Both places conducted investigations.
Livanta, after careful review and analysis, determined Breeze's "services did not meet applicable professionally recognized standards of health". Breeze did not disagree with this determination.
The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services conducted an unannounced on-site complaint investigation and determined my complaint was "found to be substantiated with deficiencies. This means that one or more of the allegations reported were verified in deficiencies were cited that were related to the allegations being investigated." They further explained Breeze would be required to submit a plan of correction describing how those deficiencies would be corrected.
There are no words to describe what it was like watching our mother die in such a horrible state knowing it could have been avoided.
Our goal is to let people know what we experienced so they can make a better decision than we did. Our mother's doctor of 20 years recommended Breeze Hospice. Our next step is to provide to him copies of the final determinations from both Livanta and Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services so he knows not to recommend them in the future. read more