What Does Hospice Mean?
Hospice is compassionate care for those who have six months or less to live. Hospice does not concentrate on curing the patient’s disease. Instead, it focuses on making the patient comfortable, enabling them to have a better quality of life.
What Does Hospice Care Mean?
Are you new to hospice? Are you looking for more information or maybe you’re not sure what hospice care is for?
Hospice care relieves suffering.
Hospice care helps patients make the most out of life.
Hospice care serves the whole family.
We’ll give you a useful overview of the entire process so you can understand three main elements of hospice care.
3 Things That Hospice Care is For
1. It helps those with serious, life-limiting illnesses.
When you or someone you know is diagnosed with a disease such as cancer, ALS or kidney failure, it’s devastating. It’s heartbreaking news that takes a while to process.
It’s even more difficult when they have been given six months or less to live.
But that’s precisely the time when you should call hospice.
Hospice provides pain management, respite care, spiritual support and other services. It does not seek to cure the illness.
In fact, one of the most common phrases hospice workers hear is “I wish I had called hospice sooner.”
While many hospice patients have cancer, hospice cares for patients with a wide variety of serious diseases.
2. It adopts a team approach to care and pain management.
Doctors and nurses are only a part of the hospice care team. There are also trained volunteers, social workers and chaplains available to help.
The goal of the hospice medical team is to help ensure that the rest of the patient’s life is comfortable. This means that the patient can spend more time with family and friends as well as experience a higher quality of life.
3. Hospice cares for the entire family.
Hospice care doesn’t end when the patient passes away. There are several grief support and bereavement care support groups and services available for the family. In many cases, there are specific programs to help children as they cope with grief.
So, What Does Hospice Mean?
It means that you or your loved one have chosen to make the most out of the remaining months of life. It means you have chosen compassionate care that will allow you to be treated at home—or wherever you call home.
Get the Truth About Hospice Care
Hospice does not kill people. In some cases, patients actually live longer under hospice care.
Hospice doesn’t mean that someone has given up. Actually, it means they want to make the most out of the time they have.
Hospice doesn’t “dope up” patients. Instead, it offers compassionate pain management that allows patients to participate in the activities they once enjoyed.
There are many misconceptions about hospice care. It’s tragic that these untruths cause needless suffering for thousands of Americans.
Don’t let rumors or myths determine your course of action.
Base your decisions on facts. And we’ve got plenty of them at Hospice Wise.
We established Hospice Wise because we were troubled by all the misconceptions surrounding hospice services. In the final months of life, hospice care makes a tremendous difference for both patients and their families.
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