Hospice care services are a type of care designed to provide support, comfort, and dignity at the end of someone’s life. Curative treatments try to extend someone’s life. But hospice focuses on maintaining a higher quality of life when someone is expected to live less than six months.
What Is Hospice Care?
Seniors with a terminal illness may choose hospice care as a solution for their end-of-life needs. The primary goal involves reducing pain, managing symptoms, and offering emotional support to seniors and family members. Hospice team members are nurses, doctors, and other specialists who are there to offer a variety of different types of care.
Symptom Management
Symptom management is one of the pillars of hospice care. This means that hospice providers address issues like nausea, pain, shortness of breath, and more. They may have additional therapies and medications to offer patients that weren’t available when patients were choosing more curative treatments.
Emotional Support
The end of life is a difficult time for everyone involved. Seniors may be facing the reality of their mortality for the first time and need help sorting through their feelings. Family members often are battling anticipatory grief well before the person they love passes away. Hospice helps everyone to find the emotional support they need to work through those feelings.
Family Support
Hospice care is about supporting the person near the end of life, but also the family. Family caregivers need help with respite time so they can be fully present for the person receiving care. Hospice providers can make sure that seniors are in good hands during that time away. If family members need bereavement support or help with household tasks, hospice can help them find the resources they need.
Coordinating Care
Seniors who are in hospice elder care often work with an entire team of care professionals. The care team typically has a social worker or nurse in charge of coordinating care and ensuring that everyone involved knows what needs to happen. This makes sure that the patient’s needs get met in a way that is consistent and effective.
Locations for Hospice
Patients might opt to receive hospice care in a hospice facility or a hospital. This is often a choice that patients who need a great deal of intensive medical care. A more popular option is for patients to receive hospice services at home. This is where they’re most comfortable and where they can be around their family and friends.
Eligibility
Qualifying for hospice care is less complicated than it sounds. Most often, patients are recommended to hospice by their doctors after the prognosis indicates that the patient is only expected to live for around six more months. Patients typically have been diagnosed with a life-limiting or terminal condition as well.
Hospice elder care is a voluntary choice for patients and families. Patients may be a textbook example of the type of situation hospice is designed to help manage, but if the patient isn’t ready for that type of care, they don’t have to make the switch. Hospice is there to help and to make patients as comfortable as possible.