What Supplies and Equipment Does Hospice Provide?

Hospice provides a broad range of medical supplies and equipment aimed at keeping a patient comfortable at home (or in a facility) without out-of-pocket costs for items related to the terminal diagnosis. Under the Medicare hospice benefit, which sets the standard most private insurers follow, covered supplies typically include a hospital bed, wheelchair or walker, oxygen equipment, medications for symptom management, wound-care materials, and personal-care items like incontinence supplies. The specifics vary by hospice agency and by what each patient actually needs, and the reality of what shows up at the door can surprise families who have never navigated end-of-life care before.

Durable Medical Equipment

The backbone of hospice supply provision is durable medical equipment, often abbreviated DME. This category covers items that are reusable, medically necessary, and appropriate for home use. The most common pieces include hospital beds with adjustable head and foot sections, pressure-relieving mattresses or mattress overlays to prevent bedsores, bedside commodes, wheelchairs, walkers, and shower chairs. Following hospice election, durable medical equipment is covered under the Medicare hospice benefit through fee-for-service Medicare.¹

The hospice agency arranges delivery and setup through a DME vendor, and the equipment arrives at the home at no charge to the patient or family. When the equipment is no longer needed, the hospice coordinates pickup as well. Families sometimes assume they need to buy or rent things like grab bars, raised toilet seats, or a bedside table; in many cases the hospice will supply those too, though smaller items sometimes fall into a gray area where the agency may or may not cover them depending on its own policies and the patient’s plan of care.

A study of palliative-care equipment requests found that the median time between a patient’s equipment application and death was about 35 days, and the types of equipment needed varied significantly depending on the patient’s diagnosis.² That matters because a patient with advanced lung disease might need oxygen concentrators and a reclining wheelchair early on, while someone with a neurological condition may primarily need transfer equipment and a specialty mattress. The hospice team assesses the home environment and the patient’s functional status to decide which equipment to order, and they can adjust as symptoms change.

Medications for Symptom Management

Hospice covers medications that are related to the terminal diagnosis and to comfort. In practice, this means pain medications (oral, topical, or injectable), anti-nausea drugs, anti-anxiety medications, laxatives for opioid-related constipation, and sometimes antibiotics for infections that cause discomfort. Medications for conditions unrelated to the hospice diagnosis, like blood-pressure drugs or thyroid pills, remain the responsibility of the patient’s regular insurance or Medicare Part D, which can confuse families who expect hospice to cover everything.

The hospice pharmacy typically delivers medications to the home, often within hours of a new order. But in rural areas, timely access can be a real problem. Research in UK primary care found that families in rural settings have been known to drive around the county for hours trying to source end-of-life medications from pharmacies that actually stock them.³ U.S. hospice agencies try to avoid this by maintaining contracts with pharmacies that keep controlled substances in stock, but after-hours and weekend gaps remain a frustration families encounter more often than the brochures suggest.

Emergency Medication Kits

One of the most practical things hospice provides is an emergency medication kit, sometimes called a comfort kit or hospice emergency kit. This is a small box of pre-packaged medications left in the home so that the caregiver can administer relief for sudden symptoms without waiting for a pharmacy delivery or a nurse visit. A typical kit contains concentrated liquid morphine for breakthrough pain or air hunger, lorazepam for anxiety or agitation, an anti-nausea medication like promethazine, and sometimes haloperidol for severe restlessness or delirium.

The kit sits in the home, usually in a secure spot, and the hospice nurse instructs the family on when and how to use each medication. Studies of these kits consistently show they help patients stay at home and avoid unwanted emergency department visits. In one pilot study, nurses estimated that the kit was used in about two-thirds of cases, with morphine and lorazepam being the most frequently administered drugs, and 93% of nurses felt an emergency department visit or hospitalization was avoided by having the kit available.⁴ A follow-up prospective study confirmed that morphine concentrate was used in about 30% of patients and lorazepam in about 21%, and roughly a third of families felt the kit may have helped the patient stay at home.⁵

Hospices that routinely provide emergency kits report fewer calls requiring unscheduled interventions compared with those that do not, and lower cost per call as well.⁶ For families, the real value is peace of mind: having something in the house that can ease sudden pain or panic at 2 a.m. without dialing 911.

Oxygen and Respiratory Equipment

Shortness of breath is one of the most distressing symptoms in terminal illness, and hospice provides the equipment to manage it. This usually means an oxygen concentrator, which is an electric device that pulls oxygen from room air, along with nasal cannulas, tubing, and sometimes portable oxygen tanks for brief trips out of the house. Oxygen therapy in the hospice context is not intended as a cure but as a bridge to relieve the feeling of breathlessness and improve comfort.⁷

Some patients also receive nebulizers for inhaled medications that open the airways or reduce secretions. In certain cases, aerosolized morphine may be used alongside oxygen to treat dyspnea that does not respond to standard oxygen alone. The hospice nurse monitors oxygen saturation at visits, but unlike in a hospital, the goal is not to chase a number on a monitor. The goal is to reduce the patient’s subjective sense of suffocation, and the equipment is adjusted based on how the patient feels rather than a lab value.

Wound Care and Personal-Care Supplies

Patients near the end of life frequently develop skin breakdown, pressure injuries, or have wounds from surgery or tumor growth. Hospice provides the dressings, gauze, tape, cleansing solutions, and barrier creams needed for wound management. The approach to wound care in hospice is comfort-focused: the priority is keeping the wound clean, managing odor, and minimizing pain during dressing changes, rather than aggressive healing protocols that might involve painful procedures.⁸

Beyond wound care, hospice supplies a range of personal-care items that families might not think to ask about. Incontinence briefs and bed pads, disposable gloves, skin protectants, and mouth-care kits are standard. Some agencies also provide nutritional supplements like thickened liquids for patients with swallowing difficulties. The hospice nurse typically brings a supply of these items at regular visits and reorders as needed, so families do not have to shop for them.

Specialized Infusion and Drug-Delivery Devices

When a patient’s symptoms cannot be controlled with pills or liquid medications by mouth, hospice may provide more advanced drug-delivery technology. This includes subcutaneous infusion pumps, which deliver a steady stream of pain or anti-nausea medication through a small needle under the skin, and elastomeric infusion devices, which are balloon-like pumps that do not require electricity or programming. One hospice service dispensed nearly 5,000 elastomeric devices with non-narcotic medication mixtures to 265 patients over five years, and about 585 devices with narcotic mixtures to 62 patients in a single year.⁹

These devices are useful because they require less monitoring than traditional IV pumps, and caregivers can manage them with minimal training. For patients who need continuous medication but want to remain at home, an elastomeric pump can make the difference between staying in bed at home and being transferred to an inpatient unit. The hospice nurse handles setup and teaches the family how to check that the device is working properly.

What Hospice Does Not Usually Provide

Knowing what hospice covers is only half the picture. Families are sometimes caught off guard by what it does not cover. Room and board are not included if the patient is at home. If the patient moves to an inpatient hospice facility or a nursing home, the hospice benefit covers the medical care but generally not the room-and-board charges at the facility, which fall to the patient’s long-term-care insurance, Medicaid, or private pay.

Medications unrelated to the terminal diagnosis, as mentioned earlier, are not covered. Neither are curative treatments for the terminal condition itself. If a patient decides to pursue a new round of chemotherapy or radiation aimed at curing or significantly delaying the disease, that falls outside the hospice benefit, and the patient may need to revoke hospice to receive those treatments under regular insurance. Hospice also does not provide 24-hour home aides. Families sometimes expect around-the-clock caregiving staff, but standard routine home hospice care includes intermittent visits from nurses, aides, social workers, and chaplains, not a live-in caregiver. Continuous-care nursing is available during a crisis period, but it is temporary and reserved for acute symptom episodes.

Home modifications like ramps, doorway widening, or bathroom renovations are not covered either. The hospice may lend a portable commode or shower bench, but structural changes to the house remain the family’s responsibility. Research on barriers to planned home deaths identifies shortages of supplies, lack of night-shift nursing support, and limited palliative experience among staff as recurring obstacles.¹⁰ These gaps are systemic, not unique to one agency, and they are worth knowing about before a crisis moment.

Caregiver Training and Safety Equipment

Hospice does not just drop off equipment and leave. Part of the benefit is training the family to use it safely. A nurse or aide teaches caregivers how to administer medications, change wound dressings, reposition the patient to prevent bedsores, and recognize signs that a symptom is worsening. Physical therapists may also visit to teach safe transfer techniques, reducing the risk of injury for both the patient and the caregiver. In one case study, physical therapy training in the hospice setting was described as providing “immeasurable” benefits by teaching the patient and caregiver how to safely perform transfers with reduced risk of injury.¹¹

Safety supplies for the caregivers themselves are part of the package too. Hospice nurses carry personal protective equipment like gloves, gowns, and face shields, and agencies are supposed to supply them consistently. A survey of home care and hospice nurses in North Carolina found that between 68% and 86% were always provided with the relevant types of PPE, and those nurses were roughly two and a half to three times more likely to actually use protective equipment when there was a potential for blood exposure.¹² The takeaway for families: if a hospice nurse arrives without gloves or other protective gear, that is a red flag about the agency’s practices.

What Happens to Medications and Equipment After Death

After a patient dies, families often wonder what to do with the leftover supplies. Equipment like hospital beds, wheelchairs, and oxygen concentrators is picked up by the DME vendor, usually within a day or two. The hospice coordinates this, so families do not need to arrange it themselves.

Leftover medications are a different story, and the rules around them are stricter and more confusing than most families expect. Controlled substances like morphine and lorazepam cannot simply be thrown in the trash. Federal guidelines recommend disposing of opioids by flushing them or using drug take-back programs. In practice, there is wide variability in how hospices handle this. A survey of Ontario hospices found significant inconsistency in procedures for storing, dispensing, and disposing of controlled substances after a patient’s death, with some hospices returning drugs to a pharmacy, others disposing of them on-site, and still others returning them to families.¹³

Hospice nurses face legal constraints too. Most nurses in one U.S. study reported that returning controlled substances to the hospice was never acceptable and considered it unsafe, consistent with legal limitations on nurses transporting controlled substances.¹⁴ The practical result is that the hospice nurse typically witnesses the family disposing of the medications at the bedside, often by mixing them with coffee grounds or cat litter and sealing them in a container, or by flushing certain drugs specifically listed by the FDA as safe to flush. If your hospice does not walk you through this process clearly, ask. Unused opioids sitting in a medicine cabinet are a diversion risk, and getting them out of the house promptly matters.

How Equipment Needs Differ by Diagnosis

Not every hospice patient gets the same box of supplies. A person with end-stage heart failure may need a hospital bed that elevates the head to ease breathing, a portable oxygen concentrator, and a daily-weight scale (at least in the early weeks). Someone with advanced dementia may need bed rails and a pressure-relieving mattress overlay more than anything else, since they spend most of their time in bed and are at high risk for skin breakdown. A patient with metastatic cancer may cycle through multiple equipment changes as their needs shift from being ambulatory with a walker to bedridden with subcutaneous infusions.

The study of assistive-technology needs in palliative care confirmed that the types of equipment required varied significantly across diagnostic categories.² This is one reason families should not assume they know what they will need based on someone else’s hospice experience. The care plan is individualized, and the hospice team should reassess equipment at every visit, adding or removing items as the patient’s condition evolves. If you feel the equipment is not keeping up with the patient’s needs, say so. Hospice agencies rely heavily on family feedback to know when something has changed between nurse visits.

Asking the Right Questions Before Enrollment

Families choosing a hospice agency rarely think to ask about supplies and equipment in detail, but doing so can prevent headaches later. Some questions worth raising during the initial intake meeting:

• Pharmacy access: Does the hospice have a contract pharmacy that delivers after hours and on weekends, or will you need to pick up medications yourself in an emergency?
• Emergency kit policy: Does the agency routinely provide an emergency medication kit at admission, or only on request? Not all hospices do it automatically, even though the evidence supports routine provision.
• DME response time: How quickly can the agency get a hospital bed or wheelchair delivered? Some can do same-day; others take two to three days.
• Supply replenishment: Who is responsible for notifying the hospice when supplies like incontinence briefs or wound dressings run low? Is there a system for reordering, or does the family need to call each time?
• Unrelated medications: Which of the patient’s current medications will the hospice cover, and which will remain under the patient’s regular insurance? Get this list in writing.

Hospice agencies vary more than most people realize. The Medicare Conditions of Participation set a floor for what must be provided, but agencies differ in how quickly they respond, how generously they supply comfort items, and how proactively they anticipate equipment needs. Asking these questions up front gives you a clearer picture of what daily life will actually look like.