The And Fast Paced Procedures Of A Hospital

Caring Hospice is a company that will provide nursing care to patients that are terminally ill. The ultimate goal is to insure the patient is kept as comfortable as possible while maintaining dignity during the dying process. This company will send registered nurses to the patient’s home for routine physical assessments, medication teaching and administration, education about terminal diseases and the dying process. The nursing staff will also create and maintain appropriate plans of care for the multi-disciplinary team to provide holistic care to the patient.

Health care is something that everyone requires in order to lead a healthy life. After a visit to a hospital there are instances when certain individuals require further care due to their circumstances. Although hospitals may provide long-term care, it is not usually ideal. Hospitals are in place to handle emergency situations and aid in stabilizing the patients. Once the patients are stable, they must be transitioned to another facility if they require further assistance. This will avoid maximum occupancy for the hospital and allow it to remain available to other patients that may need their services. Patients who require long-term care or around the clock care and are in good medical condition should seek a long-term care facility, such as a skilled nursing facility or nursing home. For some individuals, facilities such as skilled nursing facilities or nursing homes are a blessing. These types of facilities are in existence to aid in the recovery of certain injuries and or to provide living arrangements for those who lack someone to care for them or assist with meeting their health care needs.

(Costs of Care) Every one of us want to get the best deal or the best price, so if the option is available this will be people’s first choice. It is important to make sure that a person’s family member is being taken care of and not just considered a number to the facility. Most everyone has experienced this or someone has made them feel as if they were just a number and in turn care received may not have been very good.

Hospice is a process to end-of-life care and a kind of support facility for terminally ill patients. It provides comforting care, patient-centered care and related services. Comforting care relieves discomfort without improving the patient’s condition or curing his illness. Hospice is extended in a healthcare facility or at home. Its objective is to provide compassionate, emotional, and spiritual care for the dying patient.

Essentially, Hospice and palliative care focus on managing symptoms when a patient is deemed to have 6 months or less to live and allows patients to live out their lives away from a hospital or nursing home setting. Partially the reason why most people, including me, haven’t heard that much about Hospice is most likely because it is intended for people at the very end of their lives. However, another major reason is addressed in Gawande’s book, and it revolves around the idea that doctors don’t inform their patients every time that Hospice is really an option. Gawande admits himself throughout his book that like most doctors, he is always over-optimistic and focus on the treatment of the disease, forgetting to focus on the idea of just managing the symptoms in cases where treatment would only prolong the inevitable or giving too many choices for families to make. Gawande explains “All-out treatment, we tell the incurably ill, is a train you can get off at any time- just say when”, however other options are often never talked about (2014, p. 187). One example from Being Mortal is the story of Sara Monopoli, who faced an incurable form of cancer at a rather young age. Sara, along with her family and husband, never focused on just symptom management, but rather what new and outrageous treatment can be done

In contrast to the costs of standard medical care, hospice care provides an alternative that is both cost effective and caring. Unfortunately, it is actually difficult to quantify the cost savings associated with hospice care due to the fact that comparing costs during the last year of life are impacted by the variability in the length of hospice use. A study at Duke University went to extensive lengths to provide a comparison that provided an effective method for accurate comparisons. The comparison showed a reduced average Medicare expenditure of $2,309 per person from the time hospice care was initiated in comparison to the same situation handled through standard medical methods (Taylor, Ostermann, Houtven, Tulsky, & Steinhauser, 2007). The amount of cost savings varied depending on the primary health condition and the

Many terminally-ill patients give up hope when treatments are no longer available to help them and hospice care is given to them as an option. However, hospice care has proven itself to provide the best quality care for the last six months of the dying. The purpose of hospice is to provide the best care for terminally-ill patients at the end stage of their lives. Hospice offer services to support too many aspects a patient’s life such as medical, legal, spiritual care. Hospice includes art therapists, music therapists, and certified chaplains on the palliative team.

Hospice is compassionate care provided to patients facing terminal illness or illness for which there is no cure. These patients are diagnosed with an illness from which they will never recover and usually have a life prognosis of six months or less (Hospice Foundation of America, 2014). The goal of hospice care is improving quality of life and managing the symptoms of disease and the dying process. The care hospice offers is focused on pain management and emotional and spiritual support for both the patient and family (National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, 2012). Hospice care can be provided in many different settings, often the patient’s own home. Hospice care can also be provided in hospitals, nursing homes, long-term care facilities and free-standing hospice centers and is available to patients of all ages (NHPCO, 2012). A patient receiving care in a hospice program has a team of healthcare individuals that can consist of the patients own physician, nurses, home health aides, clergy, social workers, and speech and physical therapists (NHPCO, 2012). Usually, a care plan is developed by the hospice team and care of the patient is provided by family members with the support of the hospice staff (NHPCO, 2012). Nurses make regular visits to the patient and family and are on call 24/7. Once enrolled in a hospice program hospice covers everything that will be needed to care for you, from medications to manage pain to

Hospice care is a model of care that focuses on relieving symptoms and supporting patients with a life expectancy of six months or less (Altshuler, 2013). For most nurses, caring for a dying elder (individual aged 65 years and above) is a discrete, time-limited experience that begins with first contact, often in a hospital, emergency room, or long term care facility, and ends with the death itself (Phillips & Reed, 2008).

Hospice care has not been around for very longs but it is one of the fastest growing medical fields in the country, with over 1.58 million patients being cared for in 2010 alone. Hospice is an important part of caring for terminally ill patients and helps the families and loved ones to grieve.

Hospitals also provide unnecessary and expensive care to those patients that are on life support. Discuss options with those patients and make sure they are aware of the cost they are willing to leave their family to deal with. Helping hospitals cut those expenses is another important action to take.

In the United States, our population is able to maintain long lives through the advances we have made in medical care and technology. While this allows many people to live longer and higher quality lives, it also can extend the lives of the chronically ill and frail elderly. For some, this can be an arduous time as it only prolongs their pain and suffering. The money and resources used to extend their life can also be draining on their family as well. This prevents them from being able to provide for their families after their passing.

If a patient does not have the ability to exercise the right-to-die, hospice is a really good option for them to control the pain and pass peacefully. “Hospice care is specialized care designed to provide support to a person and their loved ones during an advanced illness, it focuses on comfort and quality of life rather than a cure.”(Hospice, 2015) Hospice is really the only option for people who live in states that do not support the right-to-die; it strives to give the patient the highest possible quality of life and make them comfortable, so they can live their final days to the fullest. Hospice is offered in the home, in long-term care facilities, and hospice will do about anything to keep the patient comfortable. They help prepare their patients and their families for the approaching death, and they offer bereavement services to the family after the death for up to three months. Hospice is a great resource for people who are ready to stop fighting and be comfortable, but it still does not provide the freedom that the right-to-die laws can, like allowing people to make their own choices about their life.

One of the Parker chapters talked about how doctors sometimes refer their patients to hospice care after they feel they have done everything in their power to cure the person, which means the patient is at hospice care for a period of short time. She went on to talk about how this can be very expensive, as costs tend to decrease the longer someone stay, and if they only stay for a few months, their costs generally will not decrease as much. I have been thinking a lot about that from a different perspective, and though I agree that there is an appropriate time to send patients to hospice care, rather than at the last minute, I understand, I think, why doctors would do that. I am very interested in going into surgery or oncology, and oncology especially, is a specialty that I would have to make the call

Hospice is a component of palliative care. A person does not necessarily have to be dying in order to see a palliative care specialist. This is where the service is often underutilized in the hospital. In the 18 months I have been a nurse, I have cared for many patients with chronic illnesses who have dealt with symptoms that have severely impacted their quality of life. Most of the time, it seems as though the patient’s care providers are interested in treating the patient’s acute problems. My experience has been that the symptoms are often overlooked or are being treated in a manner that is to the dissatisfaction and discomfort of the patient.