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           As used in this Part:

           (1) “Autonomous” refers to a separate and distinct operational entity which functions under its own administration and bylaws, either within or independently of a parent organization.

           (2) “Core services” are nursing services, physician services, social work services, counseling services, and support services, including trained volunteers, and bereavement and pastoral care.

           (3) “Department” means the Louisiana Department of Health.

           (4) “Hospice” means an autonomous, centrally administered, medically directed program providing a continuum of home, outpatient, and homelike inpatient care for the terminally ill patient and his family. It employs an interdisciplinary team to assist in providing palliative and supportive care to meet the special needs arising out of the physical, emotional, spiritual, social, and economic stresses which are experienced during the final stages of illness and during dying and bereavement.

           (5) “Interdisciplinary team” includes representatives from all of the core services as evidenced by documentation, planning, and team meetings.

           (6) “Palliative care” means the reduction or abatement of pain or other troubling symptoms by appropriate coordination of all services of the hospice care team required to achieve needed relief of distress.

           (7) “Terminally ill” refers to a medical prognosis of limited expected survival, of approximately six months or less at the time of referral to a hospice, of an individual who is experiencing an illness for which therapeutic strategies directed toward cure and control of the disease alone are no longer appropriate.

           Acts 1988, No. 941, §2.