Home Healthcare & Hospice

When there is no cure, there's hospice. Your home health care hospice offers end-of-life palliative care for the incurably ill from the comfort of home. Controlling the symptoms of incurable illness gives the hospice client respite from the debilitating pain in a familiar environment surrounded by family and friends.

A Restful Heritage

• Hospice simply means a place of refuge, of rest. In medieval times, hospice was shelter for ill and weary travelers so they could rest. British physician Dame Cicely Saunders first coined the term hospice as a resting place for the dying in 1967 when she opened the first hospice outside London. America's first home care hospice opened in March 1974 in Connecticut, funded by the National Cancer Institute. In 2005, the number of hospice care providers topped 4,000 organizations. Volunteers, the heart of hospice, numbered more than half a million in 2009.

An Interdisciplinary Team

• Each hospice client is served by an interdisciplinary team consisting of physicians, nursing staff, social and bereavement services, certified nursing and home health care aides and volunteers. Nurses come to your home in accordance with your care plan and serve as the liaisons between you and your physician. Social services will help you with paperwork, such as insurance, advance directives and wills, while coordinating care among available medical and community resources. Your nursing assistants aid you on a daily basis or as needed with personal care, while volunteers serve both your spiritual and temporal needs. Special support care is also available such as occupational and physical therapists and clergy.

Assistance When You Need It Most

• Your certified nursing assistant or home health aide will assist you with bathing, shampooing, dressing, changing the bed, meals, and medications as directed by the nursing staff. The assistant will chart which activities of daily living you were helped with and create a daily report to the nursing staff who reviews it and adds it to the notes of the interdisciplinary care team.

Volunteers

• Volunteers are literally the heart and backbone of hospice at-home care. They act as companions, just sitting with you if you want someone close or assist with light housekeeping chores, running errands, whatever it is that you need. Volunteers complete mandatory training focusing on listening skills, the history and hospice philosophy and basic personal care. The volunteer coordinator then matches the best available volunteer with each client and family. There is no revolving door policy with home health care hospices. Once the interdisciplinary team is in place and familiar with a client's care plan, it serves the best interest of the client and his family to keep the same team in place if at all possible.

The Five Stages of Grief

• Once a client passes away, hospice's bereavement support team makes itself available to family members for an agency-specified period of time, usually one full year. There are five stages of grief to work through: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Bereavement counseling helps surviving family members deal with each of those five stages. No one ever need feel alone.