Nina de Cocq, EOLD, RMT

12/30/2025

12/29/2025

🤍Hospitals are beginning to track non clinical outcomes tied to Death Doula involvement

🩶While Death Doulas are a newer addition in most hospital systems, we are starting to see palliative care teams, hospice programs, and research oriented hospitals that are now observing patterns when a Death Doula or similar role is involved.

🖤These outcomes are called non clinical outcomes, meaning they are not lab values or medical indicators, but human experience indicators.

✨What hospitals and palliative teams are noticing✨

1. Reduced patient anxiety and distress
Patients who have consistent non medical emotional support are showing less agitation, less panic during symptom escalation, less reported pain, and a greater acceptance of the dying process

2. Fewer last minute aggressive interventions
Families who feel emotionally prepared are not needing to request unwanted resuscitation attempts, late ICU transfers
And other non beneficial procedures, that we are used to seeing at the end of life stage

3. Improved family satisfaction after death
Families are now feeling more supported emotionally, are more informed about what to expect, and are given time to process. They also report greater peace with the death, less anger toward staff, less confusion or regret.

🤍Death doulas do what hospitals do not have time or scope for;
- sitting without agenda
- holding space for existential fear
- helping families emotionally accept what is happening
- translating medical language into human language

🩶This reduces emotional shock and reactive decision making, and saves families money.

🖤The future direction

Formal recognition will likely begin with adjunct roles, not clinical titles.

12/16/2025

One of the places I meet the most resistance at the end of life is around the use of medications to relieve symptoms such as pain, agitation, or delirium. The medications I am referring to, are often morphine, lorazepam, or haloperidol, which are commonly included in the comfort or relief kit provided when someone begins hospice care. What families struggle with most is the fear that these medications may cause their person to sleep more, or become deeply sedated, and in doing so, take away the ability to have conversation.

I understand that fear. Communication at the end of life is sacred. People hold tightly to the hope of one more chance to hear their voice. I have sat at the bedside of someone I love, longing for one more word, knowing it wasn’t going to come. I struggle with this too. Wanting to keep someone as awake and cognitively present as possible comes from love.

What I have learned, though, is that when someone is dying and suffering, it can keep them from leaning into the dying process with the peace they deserve. Medications are not something I push or force. I don’t believe in taking choice away, and I never want families to carry regret or guilt into their grief. But I do believe deeply in education and support, and in helping families make peace with the fact that sometimes medication is exactly what allows suffering to soften.

What I often say in these moments is this: they might not be able to respond to you, but they can hear you. You may have already heard their last words, but they can still hear yours. I believe this with every ounce of my being. I witnessed it with my own brother who was non-responsive in the ICU. After sitting at his bedside for many days, saying all the things I had left unsaid over the years, apologizing again and again, he woke the day before he died and his last words to me were, “I’m sorry too.” He heard me.

Medications at the end of life are not what end someone’s life, their illness and the disease process do that. These medications simply allow them to die with more peace, more ease, and less suffering, and I truly believe that is something every human being deserves.

I am not here to convince you, I am here to sit with you. I want you to feel heard, and I want you to be able to make peace with a decision I know can feel heavy and complicated. I don’t want you to carry something forward that turns into an ache, wondering if you did the right thing, or if you waited too long.

My hope is to educate and support you in a way that allows you to make peace with this choice, to give medication, if it’s needed, without hesitation, and to trust that your presence matters, that your words are heard, that they are felt, and that they wrap gently around the person you love, offering comfort, safety, and permission to let go.

Be present. Speak your heart.
Let your love hold them, and let them go.
Trust that your care, your words, your presence, wraps them in the gentlest comfort. And know that in this act of love, you have done exactly what was needed.

xo
Gabby

You can find this blog here:
https://www.thehospiceheart.net/post/medications-at-the-end-of-life-a-gentle-conversation

You might find my book “End of Life Tips” helpful. It is a guide for those at the bedside to be prepared for what could and might happen when someone is dying.
https://www.amazon.com/Life-Tips-Gabrielle-Elise-Jimenez/dp/B0C9G8PZZ5/ref=pd_aw_sim_m_sccl_2_4/130-2232800-4346236?

12/16/2025

The horrible beauty of grief 🖤

11/03/2025

10/23/2025

Melissa Meadow offers death doula services, funeral consulting, and green burial education to help individuals and families navigate end-of-life with confidence.

10/14/2025

10/08/2025

09/19/2025

This is so worth the time. A very moving account. She addresses the very essence of our humanity in the face of the death of someone we love.

09/12/2025