While some people are more aware today of the many elements hospice care involves, others believe it’s only applicable for the final days of a terminally ill person’s life. According to figures compiled by the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, a large percentage of patients access hospice care late in the course of an illness.
But there are some hidden benefits about hospice care that people may not know about, and those can enhance the patient’s quality of life if taken advantage of much earlier, says Debbie Johnston (www.debbiejohnston.com), author of The Hospice Handbook: Nurse Debbie’s Compassionate Guide To Navigating End-Of-Life Care.
“Society often associates hospice care with the last days, and families often use hospice as a last resort when a loved one takes a turn for the worse or their care becomes unmanageable,” Johnston says. “But hospice professionals hear families say all the time, ‘If I had only known all of what hospice entailed,’ they would have done it for their loved one much sooner.
The underlying philosophy of hospice care is to help people maintain a comfortable and dignified quality of life while looking at their circumstances with clarity and complete caring, and it also takes into consideration their family members. The wide range of care is a plus for the whole family.
Johnston offers the following overlooked or hidden benefits of hospice care:
- Expressive therapy. This is an integral part of most hospice programs and includes music therapy, massage therapy, art therapy, narrative therapy and pet therapy. “All these interactive treatments engage the physical body and the mind and promote well-being,” Johnston says. “It took us a long time in the West to truly accept that the mind, spirit and body are all connected. They’ve known this in Eastern civilization for a much longer time. If you work on improving one aspect of health, you are actually helping your overall well-being.”
- It’s more than end-of-life care. Johnston points out that hospice care isn’t just for the last weeks of someone’s life; it can be extended over several months. “For people with a chronic illness diagnosis such as congestive heart failure, cancer, dementia or other diseases, they have an opportunity for quality-of-life care, making them more comfortable for an extended period,” she says. “They may live for a long time with the illness, and they could benefit from getting the collaborative care available to them long before they are in crisis or their last days.”
- Supporting the whole family. Seeing a loved one decline and near death is hard on family members, and Johnston says quality hospice care includes support services for them as well. “Hospice aims to bring quality of life and comfort of all types to the whole family unit. It provides professionals like social workers and spiritual care counselors who help family members through a tough time. The hospice team educates the family and helps them to understand the process and what their loved one is experiencing.”
- Continuous care. One of the lesser-known services offered through hospice is continuous care, or crisis care. It’s one of the four levels of hospice care included in Medicare Hospice Benefits and required by Medicare Hospice regulations. The National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization explains continuous care as “predominantly nursing care, covered for at least eight hours, and up to 24 hours…“The purpose of continuous home care is to achieve palliation (helping the patient feel more comfortable and improve their quality of life) and management of acute medical symptoms. Continuous home care is only furnished during brief periods of crisis and as necessary to maintain the terminally ill patient at home.”
The two primary benefits of continuous care, Johnston says, are allowing patients to comfortably live out the remainder of their life at home, and provide families with access to a team of dedicated individuals who specialize in this level of care.
“There’s a trend towards patients wishing to remain at home for the remainder of their days,” she says. “This intensive level of medical support removes the burden of hands-on care from the family and lets them be exactly what they are in the patient’s life – son, daughter, spouse, grandchild, etc.”
“Hospice care is a validation of our dignity,” Johnston says, “and a celebration of what it means to be human. It’s love in action.”
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