The Effectiveness Of Hospice Care

This author’s personal perceptions concerning patients facing a lingering terminal illness, have been shaped by over 20 years of critical care nursing experience. Facing death and illness on a daily basis requires self-examination and a high degree of comfort with one’s own mortality, limits and values. Constant exposure to the fragility of life forces respect for the whole person and the people who love them. A general approach to patients who are actively dying is to allow them to define what they want and need during this time. The nurse’s role

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.

Death is inevitable. It is one of the only certainties in life. Regardless, people are often uncomfortable discussing death. Nyatanga (2016) posits that the idea of no longer existing increases anxiety and emotional distress in relation to one’s mortality. Because of the difficulty in level of care for end-of-life patients, the patient and the family often need professional assistance for physical and emotional care. Many family caregivers are not professionally trained in medicine, and this is where hospice comes into play. Hospice aims to meet the holistic needs of both the patient and the patient’s family through treatment plans, education, and advocacy. There is a duality of care to the treatment provided by hospice staff in that they do not attempt to separate the patient’s care from the family’s care. Leming and Dickinson (2011) support that hospice, unlike other clinical fields, focuses on the patient and the family together instead of seeing the patient independent of the family. Many times in hospitals, the medical team focuses solely on the goal of returning the patient back to health in order for them to return to their normal lives. They do not take into account the psychological and spiritual components of the patient’s journey and the journey that the family must take as well. For treatment of the patient, Leming and Dickinson agree that hospice does not attempt to cure patients, and instead concentrates solely

A survey was conducted in 2000 on more than 9,000 patients discharged from more than 2,000 hospices on the services they received (Carlson, 2007). It revealed that 22% of them received five major palliative care services, which varied among the hospices. These palliative care services were nursing care, physician care, medication management, psychological care, and caregiver support. Approximately 14% of the hospices provided all five services and 33% provided only one or two services. Only 59% of these patients received medication management services. These included administering medication, dispensing correct dosages, and setting and following dosage schedule.

1.1 Caring for patients at the end of life is a challenging task that requires not only the consideration of the patient as a whole but also an understanding of the family, social, legal, economic, and institutional circumstances that surround patient care.

Caring for patients at the end of life is a challenging task that requires not only the consideration of the individual as a whole but also an understanding of the

Caring for patients at the end of life is a challenging task that requires not only the consideration of the patient as a whole but also an understanding of the family, social, legal, economic, and institutional circumstances that surround patient care.

illnesses, and their loved ones are often reduced to helpless observers. Terminally ill patients are

Nurses: Assist the patients and families to cope with the end-of-life process such as assessing and

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.

This article can be used as a way to further support my argument about how most patients don’t utilize all of the benefits that hospice has to offer. There are some cases where people choose not to receive spiritual support due to

Having a dignified approach and respecting elderly patients in a palliative care unit is important because it is enabling them to have control over their care and treatment. This is going to help the patient to feel valued and throughout their last days of life, as they have a choice. (Social care institute for excellence, 2010). By making the patient feel as comfortable and as pain-free as possible, it will help encourage family members to respond in a positive way. This is because they are seeing that their relative is in a comfortable state.

Hospice psychologist work is to conduct some research to understand the psychological aspects of caring terminally ill patients and their families.

Before beginning, I would like to preface my remarks with one disclaimer. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Medicine, on the faculty at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Additionally, I serve as Medical Director of our in-patient hospice and palliative care unit. Moreover, I serve on the board of our local hospice organization, Hospice of the Piedmont, where I also serve as Associate Medical Director. Though my work with these organizations has greatly enhanced nd deepened my commitment to the care of the terminally ill, I in no way claim to speak for or on behalf of any of the institutions for which I serve. The opinions expressed below and in my written testimony are entirely my own.

These symptoms can either manifest themselves as pain, anxiety, dyspnea, and/or delirium. It is a reprioritization of the patients, as well as their families’, preferences regarding their plan of care. The inclination is to optimize the patient’s quality of life by reducing the amount of suffering they experience with their chronic illness (e.g. COPD, cancer, autoimmune disorders).