Top 12 Hospice Nurse Skills to Put on Your Resume
Crafting a compelling resume as a hospice nurse means spotlighting the blend of clinical precision and tender, human presence that eases the hardest days. The right skills show you can manage symptoms, communicate clearly, uphold dignity, and anchor families through shifting tides. Lead with what proves you do all of that, day after day.
Hospice Nurse Skills
- Palliative Care
- Symptom Management
- Emotional Support
- End-of-Life Care
- Patient Advocacy
- Family Counseling
- Pain Assessment
- Wound Care
- Medication Administration
- Electronic Health Records (EHR)
- HIPAA Compliance
- Crisis Intervention
1. Palliative Care
Palliative care focuses on relief—of pain, of distress, of the heavy noise around serious illness—so patients and families can breathe a little easier. In hospice, that means aligning care with what matters most to the person, tending to physical symptoms while honoring emotional, cultural, and spiritual needs.
Why It's Important
It preserves comfort and dignity. It slows the chaos and centers the patient’s goals. For hospice nurses, palliative care is the backbone: symptom control, honest conversation, and steady support for loved ones as the journey changes shape.
How to Improve Palliative Care Skills
Deepen clinical breadth: Strengthen pain and symptom management, serious-illness communication, and cultural humility. Keep learning; practice with mentorship and case reviews.
Refine conversations: Use clear, gentle language when discussing prognosis and goals. Tools like serious-illness conversation frameworks and the SPIKES approach help tough talks land softly.
Integrate holistic care: Fold in emotional and spiritual support. Invite chaplains, social workers, and volunteers to the table early.
Work as one team: Interdisciplinary huddles, shared care plans, and warm handoffs create truly seamless care.
Protect your stamina: Build sustainable self-care routines, debrief after hard cases, and use employee assistance resources to prevent burnout.
How to Display Palliative Care Skills on Your Resume
2. Symptom Management
In hospice, symptom management is the art and science of comfort. Pain, dyspnea, nausea, anxiety, secretions, pruritus, delirium—each demands careful assessment, timely treatment, and ongoing adjustment.
Why It's Important
Comfort is nonnegotiable. When symptoms are controlled, patients can rest, connect, and choose how to spend their time. Dignity stays intact.
How to Improve Symptom Management Skills
Use protocols and reassess often: Pair evidence-based pathways (e.g., dyspnea, delirium, constipation prophylaxis with opioids) with frequent bedside checks and titration.
Balance meds and non-pharm tools: Opioid stewardship, adjuncts (gabapentinoids, antipsychotics, anticholinergics), plus positioning, fans for dyspnea, guided imagery, and aromatherapy.
Anticipate: Pre-medicate before wound care or transfers; schedule antiemetics; initiate bowel regimens with the first opioid dose.
Coordinate as a team: Align nurses, prescribers, aides, and social work around one living care plan that updates in real time.
Leverage remote touchpoints when appropriate: Quick check-ins between visits help catch early changes and avert crises.
How to Display Symptom Management Skills on Your Resume
3. Emotional Support
Presence matters. Hospice nurses ease fear, normalize complex emotions, and stand with families through anticipatory grief, uncertainty, and the quiet after.
Why It's Important
Trust grows. Anxiety softens. Decisions become clearer when people feel seen and heard. Emotional steadiness raises the overall quality of care.
How to Improve Emotional Support Skills
Listen first: Open-ended questions, gentle silence, reflective statements. Let patients and families lead the tempo.
Lean into empathy: Name feelings without judgment. Validate, then guide.
Tailor reassurance: Explain what to expect, what you’ll do to keep them comfortable, and how to reach you—day or night.
Know when to loop others in: Social work, chaplaincy, and bereavement specialists expand the circle of support.
Mind your own well-being: Boundaries and debriefs protect your capacity to be fully present.
How to Display Emotional Support Skills on Your Resume
4. End-of-Life Care
End-of-life care in hospice is focused, gentle, and personal. Comfort leads. Symptoms are anticipated. Small details—mouth care, music, lighting—carry real weight.
Why It's Important
It honors the person and the moment. Families remember how their loved one’s last days felt. Your care shapes that memory.
How to Improve End-of-Life Care Skills
Strengthen communication: Regular updates, clear explanations of signs of active dying, and honest timelines reduce fear.
Individualize the plan: Cultural preferences, rituals, and environment matter. Document and follow them.
Master comfort measures: Pain and dyspnea protocols, secretion management, terminal agitation care, and non-pharm soothing.
Prepare families: Teach what to expect, when to call, and how to participate in comfort care.
Keep learning: Courses such as ELNEC and in-house trainings deepen skills across settings.
Collaborate closely: Daily touchpoints with the interdisciplinary team keep care aligned and nimble.
Care for the caregiver: Grief touches clinicians, too. Use supervision and reflective practice to stay grounded.
How to Display End-of-Life Care Skills on Your Resume
5. Patient Advocacy
Advocacy means translating wishes into action. You elevate the patient’s voice, protect their rights, and ensure the plan of care matches their values.
Why It's Important
Decisions are honored. Unwanted interventions fall away. The care team moves in the same direction—with the patient leading.
How to Improve Patient Advocacy Skills
Clarify goals early: Elicit values and priorities. Document advance directives, DNR orders, and POLST forms clearly.
Communicate across settings: Hand off succinct summaries when patients move between home, hospital, and facility. Close the loop.
Educate and empower: Teach families about options, burdens vs. benefits, and likely outcomes so choices feel informed, not rushed.
Address whole-person needs: Advocate for equipment, financial and respite resources, and spiritual support—not just medications.
Model professionalism: Calm, consistent, and persistent advocacy earns trust and results.
How to Display Patient Advocacy Skills on Your Resume
6. Family Counseling
Families navigate shifting roles, grief in advance, and tough choices. You help them talk, cope, and participate in care without losing themselves.
Why It's Important
When families feel supported, patients feel safer. Conflict eases. Care becomes coordinated instead of chaotic.
How to Improve Family Counseling Skills
Practice active listening: Hear the worry under the words. Reflect, normalize, and guide toward shared decisions.
Host regular family meetings: Short, structured touchpoints keep everyone informed and reduce mixed messages.
Teach what to expect: Explain the disease course, signs of decline, and how to help with comfort measures.
Offer resources: Connect families to bereavement services, caregiver support, and local therapist directories when more help is needed.
Mind dynamics: Name tensions kindly, set ground rules, and keep the patient’s goals centered.
How to Display Family Counseling Skills on Your Resume
7. Pain Assessment
Accurate pain assessment drives effective relief. In hospice, that includes verbal scales and nonverbal cues, functional impact, and the context around suffering—emotional, spiritual, cultural.
Why It's Important
When you measure pain well, you treat it well. Comfort improves. Complications drop. Daily life gets bigger than the pain again.
How to Improve Pain Assessment Skills
Use validated tools: Numeric or verbal scales when possible; PAINAD or CPOT for patients with cognitive impairment.
Assess comprehensively: Intensity, character, timing, triggers, alleviating factors, breakthrough frequency, and functional limits.
Reassess and document: Check response after interventions and titrate promptly. Trend over time, not just snapshots.
Engage families: Teach how to observe and report changes, especially for nonverbal patients.
Consider equity and culture: Explore beliefs about pain and treatment; adjust approaches respectfully.
How to Display Pain Assessment Skills on Your Resume
8. Wound Care
Hospice wound care prioritizes comfort and odor, moisture, and bleeding control. Healing is welcome when possible, but relief is the goal.
Why It's Important
Good wound care reduces pain, infection risk, and distressing symptoms. It dignifies the body and eases caregiving.
How to Improve Wound Care Skills
Assess meticulously: Size, depth, tissue type, exudate, odor, pain, peri-wound skin. Use a consistent tool.
Keep it gentle: Nonadherent dressings, atraumatic cleansing, and minimal disruption at changes.
Manage moisture: Maintain a balanced wound bed with dressings that handle exudate without drying tissue.
Control odor and bleeding: Consider charcoal dressings, topical metronidazole when appropriate, and hemostatic measures for friable tissue.
Pre-medicate: Dose analgesics before changes and repositioning to blunt procedure pain.
Support nutrition and positioning: Protein, vitamins, hydration, pressure relief, and surface selection matter.
Document and adjust: Track trends and pivot quickly when goals shift from healing to comfort alone.
Educate caregivers: Clear instructions reduce anxiety and improve consistency between visits.
Helpful references (no links): WoundSource, WOCN Society guidance, National Pressure Injury Advisory Panel recommendations, and hospice wound care best-practice pathways.
How to Display Wound Care Skills on Your Resume
9. Medication Administration
Medication administration in hospice is precise and flexible. Routes shift (sublingual, transdermal, subcutaneous infusions), doses change fast, and deprescribing is often just as important as starting something new.
Why It's Important
Safe, timely meds mean steady comfort, fewer adverse effects, and less panic when symptoms surge.
How to Improve Medication Administration Skills
Stick to the rights: Right patient, drug, dose, route, time, indication, and documentation—every time.
Master conversions: Equianalgesic calculations, opioid rotations, and breakthrough dosing keep pain controlled without oversedation.
Use eMARs and checklists: Clean medication records and double-check processes cut errors sharply.
Teach and simplify: Explain side effects and schedules. Streamline regimens to what’s essential and tolerable.
Think ahead: Keep comfort kits ready. Establish PRN parameters so after-hours needs are covered.
Audit and learn: Review near-misses and outcomes. Tweak workflows to tighten safety.
How to Display Medication Administration Skills on Your Resume
10. Electronic Health Records (EHR)
EHRs are the shared memory of the team. In hospice, they hold symptom trends, med changes, goals-of-care notes, equipment needs, and secure messages that keep everyone synchronized.
Why It's Important
Fast access to complete information prevents duplication, speeds decisions, and supports coordinated care across home, hospital, and facility.
How to Improve Electronic Health Records (EHR) Skills
Streamline documentation: Use smart phrases, templates, and checklists tailored to hospice scenarios (active dying, crisis visits, bereavement risk).
Champion interoperability: Exchange summaries with hospitals, PCPs, and pharmacies; reconcile meds religiously after every transition.
Train continuously: Short refreshers on new workflows, e-prescribing, and secure messaging keep the team efficient.
How to Display Electronic Health Records (EHR) Skills on Your Resume
11. HIPAA Compliance
HIPAA in hospice means safeguarding every shred of protected health information—spoken, written, or digital—while sharing just enough for safe, effective care.
Why It's Important
Privacy builds trust and meets federal requirements. Patients deserve confidentiality, and organizations avoid costly violations.
How to Improve HIPAA Compliance Skills
Train routinely: Annual refreshers, real-case scenarios, and quick updates when policies change.
Communicate securely: Use encrypted tools. Verify identities before discussing PHI by phone.
Limit access: Role-based permissions and the “minimum necessary” standard, always.
Protect devices: Strong passwords, auto-lock, no PHI on personal devices, and rapid-report processes for loss/theft.
Audit and improve: Periodic chart access reviews, risk assessments, and corrective action when gaps appear.
How to Display HIPAA Compliance Skills on Your Resume
12. Crisis Intervention
Crisis happens: sudden dyspnea, uncontrolled pain, escalating agitation, a family in shock. Hospice nurses stabilize the moment, steady the room, and chart the next steps.
Why It's Important
Swift, skilled intervention prevents avoidable hospitalizations, reduces suffering, and restores a sense of safety for everyone present.
How to Improve Crisis Intervention Skills
Communicate with clarity: Calm voice, short sentences, step-by-step instructions. Name what you see and what you’re doing.
Apply focused clinical protocols: Rapid assessments, standing orders for breakthrough symptoms, and ready-to-go comfort kits.
Use de-escalation: Reduce stimuli, set gentle limits, and enlist trusted family members to soothe.
Coordinate the team: Quick calls to prescribers, social work, and on-call staff ensure the plan holds after you leave.
Close the loop: Debrief with colleagues, document thoroughly, and arrange follow-up to prevent repeat crises.
How to Display Crisis Intervention Skills on Your Resume
