Written and reviewed by the Lily Hospice clinical team. Updated September 2026.
Short answer: At Lily Hospice, a real person answers (248) 955-5100 at 2 a.m., and a hospice nurse calls the family back; a nurse can come to the home, assisted living or nursing facility at night if the situation needs it. Every Medicare-certified hospice is required to make nursing available around the clock, but how that works in practice differs a lot: some route night calls to an answering service that pages a nurse, some to a call center in another state, some to the same team that visits in the daytime. Below is how to tell them apart before you need to.
What Medicare requires of every hospice at night
Medicare’s hospice rules say nursing services must be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and that a hospice must be able to respond to a patient’s needs at any hour. That is the floor. It does not say who picks up the phone, how long the callback takes, or whether a nurse will actually drive out at 3 a.m.
Three ways hospices handle the night, and what to ask
- A live person, then a nurse. The phone is answered by a person who knows the hospice, takes the details, and reaches the on-call nurse directly. Ask: “Is the person who answers at night your employee or a service? How long until the nurse calls me back?”
- An answering service that pages. Common and workable, but the caller often repeats the story twice and waits. Ask: “What is your average callback time after 10 p.m.?”
- A remote triage line. A nurse somewhere else decides whether to send a local nurse. Ask: “If my mother is in pain at 3 a.m., will a nurse from your team come to the house, and how often does that happen?”
How Lily does it
A person answers, day or night. A Lily nurse calls back, and if the family needs hands at the bedside, a nurse comes: to a home in Warren, an assisted living apartment in Rochester Hills, a nursing facility in Detroit. Night visits are for real needs (pain or breathing that is not controlled, a fall, a family that does not know what is happening) and the nurse who comes can adjust medications with the physician, coach the family, and stay until things settle. Facilities call the same number and get the same nurse.
What you can do before the first night
- Save the hospice number in every family member’s phone under “Hospice nurse,” not the agency name; at 2 a.m. nobody remembers the agency name.
- Ask the admitting nurse to walk you through the “comfort kit” medications and when to use each, and to write it down.
- Ask what changes to expect in the coming days so a normal change does not become an emergency call.
- Know that you are meant to call. Families apologize for calling at night; the night line exists for exactly that.
Comparing hospices on this
Medicare does not publish night responsiveness, but it does publish the share of nursing minutes delivered on weekends and how often a nurse or social worker visited in the last three days of life. Both say something about a hospice’s willingness to show up outside business hours. Every hospice serving Oakland, Macomb and Wayne counties is in our directory with those numbers (Lily: 5.9% weekend share, below the metro median, and 71.3% last-three-days visits, well above the national 48.3%; we publish both).
Need a nurse now? Call (248) 955-5100. Not sure it is time? Read “Is It Time?” or how fast hospice can start.
Hospice isn’t giving up. It’s showing up.