A terminal diagnosis brings with it a heavy psychosocial toll. Hospice care employs skilled psychosocial counselors who help your loved one understand the end-of-life process and help provide restoration of social and emotional health.
Feelings of regret, anger, and grief are a common occurrence for those nearing the end-of-life. As time grows shorter, many seek to restore broken relationships, mend hurt feelings, and draw closer to friends and loved ones. Hospices provide skilled spiritual and emotional counselors who can help your loved one achieve peace of the spirit and heart prior to death.
Activities like eating, toileting, bathing, and dressing are all normal parts of our daily routine that we would normally take for granted, but may become harder for your loved one as the terminal illness progresses.
Hospice provides highly-trained nurses and aides who can help your loved one perform these daily activities in the comfort and security of home and with dignity. Hospice care helps provide both the patient and you, the caregiver, with the information and assistance needed to know what dietary intake is correct, and when and how to make dietary adjustments as needed. As a caregiver, you will likely bear the majority of the end-of-life care workload, being there for your terminally ill loved one around the clock, and assisting with nearly every facet of daily life.
Hospice takes special care to help support you and the crucial role you play on the end-of-life journey by providing training, skilled counseling, education, and care assistance directly to you and your loved one at home. Though caregivers shoulder the majority of care at home, hospice organizations recognize the around-the-clock workload that caregiving demands.
Your focus as a caregiver is continually placed upon the well-being of your loved one; however, your household and everyday life still continues to place demand upon you. Hospice also extends aid to caregivers in their home life by helping in everyday domestic tasks. Be it light cleaning, cooking, or picking up dry cleaning, hospice provides passionate volunteers who are able to help you keep your domestic duties maintained while you focus on the care and comfort of your loved one.
The demands place upon you by the caregiving role can quickly lead to burnout. Taking breaks, asking for help, and stepping away from caregiving momentarily is absolutely vital to your health. To ensure your well-being as a caregiver, hospice offers respite care: a temporary period of in-patient care that allows you time to unwind, relax, and focus on self-care or tend to household needs.
Hospice care treats the person and symptoms of the disease, rather than treating the disease itself. Hospice care is also family-centered — it includes the patient and the family in making decisions. Hospice care is used when a disease, such as advanced cancer, gets to the point when treatment can no longer cure or control it.
In general, hospice care should be used when a person is expected to live about 6 months or less if the illness runs its usual course. People with advanced cancer should have a discussion with their family members and doctor to decide together when hospice care should begin. Studies show hospice care often is not started soon enough. It's important to know that you can leave hospice and go into active cancer treatment any time you want.
But the hope that hospice brings is a quality life, making the best of each day during the last stages of advanced illness. All hospice providers must offer certain services. But they tend to have different approaches to service, staffing patterns, and types of support services offered. Care also extends to those who are close to the patient, as well as into the bereavement period after the patient has died. Most hospice care is provided in your own home, but it can also be provided in a care home, as an in-patient at the hospice itself, or as a day patient visiting the hospice.
Hospice care is a style of care, rather than something that takes place in a specific building. Hospice teams include doctors, nurses, social workers, therapists, counsellors and trained volunteers.
Hospices aim to feel more like a home than hospitals do. They can provide individual care more suited to the person who is approaching the end of life, in a gentler and calmer atmosphere than a hospital. Hospices vary, but your local hospice will offer medical and nursing care, including controlling pain and other symptoms.
It may also offer:. Most hospices will be happy to talk to you about what they can offer or show you around their facilities if you are considering hospice care. Hospice provides chaplains and other spiritual counselors from all faiths and no faith. Hospice is not just for cancer patients. Certainly cancer patients make up a large number of hospice patients. Hospice care is not expensive. Hospice is usually less expensive than conventional care during the last six months of life.
Hospice is an all-inclusive benefit covered by Medicare, Medicaid, Medi-Cal and most private insurance companies. Hospice does not forego medications or treatments. On the contrary, hospice takes advantage of state-of-the-art medications and palliative treatments to relieve pain and symptoms to keep patients comfortable.
Families are not shielded from the hospice patient. Hospice professionals believe that when family members—including children—experience the dying process in a caring environment, it helps to counteract the fear of their own mortality and the loss of their loved one.
Hospice does not mean anyone has failed the patient.
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