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

(b) “Department” means the Mississippi Department of Health.

(c) “Freestanding hospice” means a hospice that is not a part of any other type of health-care provider.

(d) “Hospice” means an autonomous, centrally administered, nonprofit or profit, medically directed, nurse-coordinated program providing a continuum of home, outpatient and homelike inpatient care for not less than four (4) terminally ill patients and their families. It employs a hospice care 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. This care is available twenty-four (24) hours a day, seven (7) days a week, and is provided on the basis of need regardless of inability to pay.

(e) “Hospice care team” means an interdisciplinary team which is a working unit composed by the integration of the various helping professions and lay persons providing hospice care. Such team shall, as a minimum, consist of a licensed physician, a registered nurse, a social worker, a member of the clergy or a counselor and volunteers.

(f) “Hospice services” means items and services furnished to an individual by a hospice, or by others under arrangements with such a hospice program.

(g) “Medically directed” means that the delivery of medical care is directed by a licensed physician who is employed by the hospice for the purpose of providing ongoing palliative care as a participating care giver on the hospice care team.

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

(i) “Patient” means the terminally ill individual receiving hospice services.

(j) “Person” means an individual, a trust or estate, partnership, corporation, association, the state, or a political subdivision or agency of the state.

(k) “Terminally ill” refers to a medical prognosis of limited expected survival, of six (6) 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 outside the context of symptom control are no longer appropriate.