Hospice Aide Certification: Overview and FAQ
If you’re ready to advance your career while caring for people in the final stages of life, earning a hospice aide certification could help you gain confidence and recognition. This certification shows your commitment to this meaningful and essential work. Here’s what to know about it and the steps to obtain it.
What Do Hospice Aides Do?
Hospice aides are essential members of the interdisciplinary team, providing direct care to patients during the end-of-life process. Aides are often some of the most essential caregivers for families on a daily basis — they tend to see hospice patients just as often as nurses and more often than social workers.
Hospice aides can work in home health agencies, inpatient hospice centers, and in a private-duty capacity with individual families. Their typical responsibilities include:
- Personal care: Assisting with activities of daily living (ADLs) such as bathing, dressing, and toileting.
- Mobility assistance: Helping patients get in and out of bed, and repositioning to prevent bedsores.
- Basic medical support: Taking and recording vital signs, and reporting changes.
- Emotional support: Providing companionship and emotional comfort to patients and their families.
- Household tasks: Performing light housekeeping duties, such as changing linens, cleaning, doing laundry, and preparing meals.
- Medication reminders: Ensuring patients take their prescribed medications on time, without administering medications themselves.
- Monitoring conditions: Reporting any changes in patient condition to the hospice nurse or medical team.
Certification Benefits for Hospice Aides
Why would you want to earn a hospice home health aide certification? Here are some of the benefits of certifications for hospice nursing professionals:
- Professional recognition
- Improved patient care
- Career advancement
- Increased confidence
- Enhanced knowledge and skills
- Patient trust
Become a Certified Hospice Nursing Assistant: 4 Steps
The leading certification for hospice aides is the Certified Hospice and Palliative Nursing Assistant (CHPNA) credential, offered by the Hospice and Palliative Credentialing Center (HPCC). To earn this certification, you’ll need to follow the steps below.
Step 1: Meet Hospice Aide Certification Requirements
Before applying, ensure you meet the eligibility requirements. You’ll need to have at least 500 hours of hospice or palliative care experience in the past 12 months (or 1,000 hours in the past 24 months). This experience should be in direct patient care under a licensed nurse’s supervision.
Step 2: Apply for Certification
Next, you’ll apply for the hospice aide certification online. If you’re a member of the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association (HPNA), have your membership number ready so you can use it to access the application fee discount. You’ll also need a credit card to pay the application fees, which are as follows:
- Initial certification for nonmembers: $225
- Initial certification for HPNA members: $175
- Retesting fee: $125
When scheduling your exam, you’ll have a choice between an in-person test and a remotely proctored one. Depending on when you apply for certification, you’ll be given a window of time to take the test. View the testing window that corresponds to your application period below:
| Application Start Date | Application Deadline | Testing Window |
|---|---|---|
| December 1 | February 15 | March 1–31 |
| March 1 | May 15 | June 1–30 |
| June 1 | August 15 | September 1–30 |
| September 1 | November 15 | December 1–31 |
If you set an exam appointment and need to change it, you can do so as many times as you need. But remember that you’ll still need to reschedule and take the exam within your window.
Step 3: Pass the Hospice Aide Certification Exam
If you prepare well, your odds of passing the CHPNA exam are fairly good — about 75% of first-time test-takers pass. Still, it’s worth spending some time going over the exam content to boost your confidence. There are 110 questions in these content areas:
Activities of daily living
- Hygiene
- Grooming
- Ambulation and mobility
- Toileting
- Nutrition and hydration
Patient status and environment
- Observing and reporting on the patient’s condition
- Facilitating non-drug treatments for symptoms
- Infection control measures
- Promoting an optimal environment for patient and family support
- Identifying changes in physical status
- Identifying changes in mental status
- Identifying changes in functional status
- Identifying changes in respiratory status
Psychosocial and spiritual care
- Spiritual care
- Respecting differences and maintaining a neutral attitude
- Identify and assist patient and family needs
- Assure dignity and honor patient/family choices at the time of death
- Participating in bereavement/grief follow-up
- Assist with communication between patient/family and care providers
- Provide support for changes in body image
- Provide support for changes in mental status
- Offer opportunities to enhance socialization
- Observe and report threats to patient/family safety
Professional skills
- Interdisciplinary collaboration
- Ethics, roles, and responsibilities
Step 4: Maintain Your Certification
CHPNA certification is valid for four years. To renew, you’ll need to retake the certification exam and pay a fee:
- Nonmembers: $200
- HPNA members: $150
Certified Hospice Nursing Assistant FAQs
What certifications does a hospice aide need?
Hospice aide requirements include becoming a CNA (certified nursing assistant) and gaining experience in hospice care. Becoming a CNA typically involves earning a high school diploma, completing a training program, and passing an exam.
A hospice aide certification is a separate, additional credential from your CNA certification. You’ll need experience before you can become hospice certified. Hospice aide certification is for those seeking to advance their career and increase their competitiveness when applying for roles.
What’s the average hospice aide salary?
The average hospice aide in the U.S. makes around $35,000 per year. What you make in this role will depend on your experience, employer, any credentials you have, and your location. If you’re interested in earning more as a nurse aide, here are some of the locations with the highest wages for nursing assistants:
What is a hospice aide vs. CNA?
These roles have similar backgrounds and training, and they both provide direct nonmedical care to patients. But there are key differences between the two, including:
- Goals: CNAs may work with patients who are sick, but whose goals of care involve healing or returning to a prior level of functioning. The goal of hospice care is to provide comfort and create an environment that supports patients and their families as they progress through the dying process.
- Settings: CNAs may work in hospitals, clinics, outpatient settings, skilled nursing facilities, and more. Hospice aides are more specialized. While they may work in some of the same areas, they tend to serve patients in their homes, living facilities, and inpatient hospice units.
- Populations: Both CNAs and hospice aides can work with patients of all ages with varying diagnoses, but patients in hospice tend to be older and sicker.
Related Certifications
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