Hospice care is designed to meet the unique needs of individuals who have been diagnosed with a life-limiting illness and have chosen to either stop treatment or have no viable options for curative treatment. Hospice care is not designed to heal or cure a health condition. It is intended to relieve pain and symptoms while attending to an individual’s physical, personal, emotional and spiritual needs. Hospice care helps individuals who are facing death make the most of each and every moment possible — supporting quality of life as life draws to a close. When pain and symptoms are relieved, the anxiety and stress that may accompany a terminal illness are lessened, too.
In addition to expert pain and symptom management, our hospice team is empathetic, compassionate and highly skilled at addressing our patients’ unique needs and circumstances, including providing support for the loved ones and caregivers who find themselves on the journey with a friend or loved one.
For caregivers, the stress of caring for someone with a serious illness is reduced by having a team of compassionate professionals available. We work closely with family members and loved ones to educate and empower them as caregivers. Our team provides much-needed support not only for our patients, but also for their loved ones, after death, through grief support.
Our hospice care team is dedicated to helping you live life as fully as possible wherever you reside, with comfort, meaning, respect and dignity. It is important to know that hospice does not provide 24-hour care.
Hospice care includes:
- Pain and symptom management
- Help with bathing, dressing and/or eating
- Emotional and spiritual support
- Medications, equipment and supplies
- Caregiver support, education and guidance from your hospice team
- Grief support
Our caring and dedicated hospice team includes:
- Physicians
- Nurses
- Social Workers
- Spiritual Advisors
- Medical Director
- Physical, Speech and Occupational Therapists
- Specially Trained Volunteers
There are many reasons and many ways hospice care benefits individuals, families and caregivers, including;
- Hospice treats you, not the disease. The focus is on comfort and care, not curing. You and your family’s medical, social, emotional and spiritual needs are addressed by a team of hospice professionals and volunteers.
- Hospice considers your entire family, not just you, as the “unit of care.” You and your family are included in the decision-making process. Hospice will help you and your family make choices about end-of-life issues and enable you to have greater control over these choices.
- Hospice offers palliative (comfort care), rather than curative treatment. Hospice will provide care and comfort when cure is no longer an option. Through ever-advancing technology, pain and symptom control will enable you to live as fully and comfortably as possible.
- Hospice emphasizes quality, rather than length of life. Hospice neither hastens nor postpones your death. It affirms life and regards dying as a normal process.
- Bereavement counseling is provided to your family for up to 13 months after your death.
