What You Should Expect in a Home Hospice Care
Hospice care is a philosophy using holistic approach for treating a person. It will not only concentrate on the disease but the total well-being of the patient. .
The word hospice arises from the Latin word “hospitium”, meaning guesthouse. It was initially used to identify a place of shelter for the fatigued and ill travelers returning from religious pilgrimages. It was Dr. Cicely Saunders, a British physician, who first came up with the modern concept for the hospice movement in the 1960s.
Hospice services target the needs of both the person and the family. The health care team attends to practical needs, such as insurance coverage, transportation, and physical assistance. They also help to improve the emotional and spiritual needs of the person and the family, for example caregiver stress, grief, and anxiety about dying.
Hospice services involves assistance from an interdisciplinary team that includes a doctor, psychologist, nurse, social worker, chaplain, pharmacist, nursing assistant, volunteers, nutritionist, and physical therapist.
Hospice care is focused on improving the quality of life of people confronted by life-limiting illnesses. Its overarching goal is to offer comfort, relieve physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering, and improve the dignity of terminally ill folks.
Hospice Services are usually divided into four:
– Routine Home Care. This is the most common sort of hospice service, in which a trained hospice team supplies core services in the patient’s home. Hospice care in this level includes home visits from a doctor, specialist, nurses and health aides once or thrice per week. Services might include counseling, medications, medical equipment and supplies, lab services, and perhaps physical therapy.
– Respite Care. This sort of care is only perfect for short-term period- normally until five days. The sufferer will be admitted to a hospice facility to provide the family or caregivers time to relax and move away from the physical and emotional demands of care giving.
– General Inpatient Hospice Care. This type of service is generally provided to persons with uncontrolled and stressful physical and psycho-social symptoms. It involves round-the-clock support to three kinds of inpatient facilities, for example free standing facility, hospital, and a long term care facility.
– Continuous Home Care. This service is ideal for patients who are under the general inpatient hospice care, but who prefer to remain in their homes. When compared with routine home care, this sort is more intense. The nurse is stationed in the patient’s home until it is all totally under control.
Locating an in home hospice care service is quite difficult. The internet, however, provides options. If you find a very good one, an agent of the client will meet with the patient and the family to clarify the hospice philosophy and services.
They will confirm medical eligibility, insurance coverage, and patient and family choice for hospice care. If hospice is to be the right type of medical care, paperwork would be completed and services can start.
Faith Richards is a student researching for in home hospice care and hospice services.