What is hospice care?

Relieving suffering: Hospice care focuses on relieving or preventing suffering rather than trying to treat the underlying medical problems of patients with terminal illnesses. Hospice care may involve many types of health care professionals and will focus not just on physical but also emotional and social aspects of end-of-life care.

Dying with Dignity: Hospice is a choice on how one wishes the final chapter of their life to end. Regrettably, medicine has evolved into treating problems rather than patients. If a patient wishes no more heroics, hospitalizations and/or invasive procedures performed; hospice care provides a powerful form of dying with dignity. If the prognosis of less than 6 months to live, it is potentially a great alternative.

Hospice care: provides medical services, emotional and spiritual resources for people who are in the last stages of a serious illness, such as cancer or heart failure. Hospice also helps family members manage the practical details and emotional challenges of caring for a dying loved one. The goal is to keep the patient comfortable and improve the quality of life.

Hospice services: Palliative care at the end of life. They include nursing, assistance with caregivers on a limited basis, chaplaincy, bereavement counseling, social worker and physician care (medical director in many cases). You are covered for many services and this includes medications related to your terminal diagnosis. The hospice team is there to help you transition in the last phase of life.

End of life care.: Hospice is meant for those who seemingly at the end of life, although that end can still be many months away. The emphasis of hospice care is not trying to save the life, but to give comfort to the individual as their death approaches.

The Dying: Hospice palliative care becomes appropriate when patients and their families decide to forego curative therapies in order to concentrate on maximizing comfort and quality of life, when curative treatments are no longer beneficial, when the burdens of these treatments outweigh the benefits, or when patients are entering the final weeks to months of life.

Sooner : Although hospice care is defined by medicare for any patient with a prognosis of 6 months or less, we often times don't see people come to hospice until they have hours to days. Many physicians think that hospice is only when the patient is "dying, " however the hospice team can provide better care by getting to the know the patient and family over several months rather than hours.

Hospice: Hospice is palliative care for patients who are not expected to live longer than six months. You would use hospice for care for the expertise of the clinical team that surrounds you and your family through that phase of your life.

End of life care.: Hospice is meant for those who seemingly at the end of life, although that end can still be many months away. The emphasis of hospice care is not trying to save the life, but to give comfort to the individual as their death approaches. We use hospice services when the end of life is drawing near and we want to focus on things like pain relief.