How to Choose the Right Hospice Care Provider: Essential Criteria and Questions to Ask
Deciding to move a loved one into hospice care is never an easy one but everyone reaches their end of life at some point and the care they receive makes all the difference in how they spend their last day, weeks, or months. Any hospice program is going to focus on a person’s dignity and quality of life as they reach its end and that’s something family members should want to provide. There are some important questions to ask and criteria to consider when the time comes to make the decision.
One of the most important aspects of moving a loved one into hospice care is being comfortable with the decision you’ve made and the hospice and palliative care facility you’ve chosen to use. No matter what the person’s life expectancy happens to be or whether or not they’re suffering from a terminal illness or other serious illness will have an impact on the end-of-life care facility and team you choose. Here are the best ways to go about making a decision that you’re always going to be comfortable with.
Defining Hospice Care
Finding the right hospice care starts with understanding what it is and what it can offer your loved one as their time approaches and it should offer you just as much comfort as it offers them. The definition of hospice care focuses on physical comfort as well as spiritual and emotional support as they reach the end of their life expectancy, be it days, weeks, or months. That means your loved one will have access to hospice teams and hospice focuses that will give them support they would otherwise miss out on in a traditional assisted living facility.
When your family member or loved one is in a position to begin hospice care, be sure to ask about which services they’ll have access to and make sure it aligns with both their wishes and your own. It’s also important to know that you can decide to provide your in-home hospice care with a respite care team and other services to help you out. If that’s something you want, it’s certainly something to ask about while you’re making your decision and it should be one of the the most important hospice services that the right provider offers to its patients.
Palliative Care and Hospice Care
An important distinction to make when it comes to the type of care you need is between palliative care and hospice care and you’ll want to know which one you need. A palliative care team is there for anyone approaching the end of life with a serious illness who needs treatment intended to treat other symptoms that can affect their quality of life. That means administering pain relief and prescription drugs to manage symptoms as much as possible while paying close attention to the patient’s pain.
A terminally ill patient with a life-limiting illness is best suited for this type of care as the disease follows its usual course. One important thing to ask about is the level of grief counseling and bereavement services they offer for you and other loved ones. Bereavement support is an incredibly important aspect to consider for family caregivers and grief support can be taken advantage of during the day-to-day care of your loved one.
The Hospice Team
The best way to get the hospice care your loved one deserves is to ensure that you have a hospice care team that covers every aspect of the care they need and can provide it in a caring and compassionate manner. You should have a hospice doctor on your hospice team who can monitor your loved one and prescribe anything they need during their medical treatment. Hospice patients will spend most of their time with a registered nurse and they always provide symptom management and social care throughout your loved one’s stay.
Make sure you have access to a social worker on staff who can help you navigate the labyrinthine environment of both medicare benefit services and private health insurance. Medical supplies, medical equipment, and medical care always cost money and they’ll help you make sure the proper entities are paying for it. Finally, the hospice medical director is in charge of it all and you should never have a problem with asking to meet them and discuss the care team and its medical care plan.
Hospice Services Provided
It’s always best to see out hospice care in the comfort and familiarity of your loved one’s own home and your hospice providers should be well-versed in what it takes to care for someone as a home health aide. No one should have to go to a nursing home if they want to, and the right hospice provider will provide the right emotional, social, and spiritual support they need, whether it’s for a long time or only a short time. If you read the mission statement, choosing hospice care that suits your in-home needs should be a very easy task.
When you decide to receive hospice care in your home, you’ll still get ambulance transportation to and from urgent medical care and emergency room visits that your private insurance will cover for you. You’ll still get access to social workers who can help you, just like you’d receive at an inpatient facility, along with trained volunteers who can help you with other treatments and care planning. It will all come with a level of comfort that you could never expect to get from nursing homes, no matter how great or small the symptom burden happens to be.
Who Can Benefit from Hospice Care?
Simply put, anyone who’s nearing the end of life care can benefit from hospice care and a hospice staff will be on-call to make sure their quality of life stays as high as possible. Family members will also benefit from hospice care, especially when it comes to respite care and social services. That makes it a decision that only makes sense for everyone and every hospice benefit will be there you make this life-changing event as easy as it can be.
Whether your loved one is suffering from lung disease, needs curative treatment, or wants physical therapy. when they receive hospice care, they’ll be given all the symptom relief they need with care planning that puts them first. The home health aides who visit your loved one will be able to advance care planning to have the support of healthcare providers to offer the best medical care they can. That’s something you could never expect to get at a nursing home and hospice professionals always enjoy one-on-one relationships with their patients.
Questions to Ask Your Doctor
Your best course of action is to ask your doctor what they think about hospice care and what it can do for your loved one and other family members. The chances are very high that hospice services will come with a high recommendation and he or she can fill you in on all the hospice services that you should expect from your hospice team. No one knows more about what a hospice team should mean to you and what palliative care you should be expecting when you finally make the decision.
As stated before, palliative care can mean the difference between a comfortable end of life and one you wouldn’t want for your loved one. That’s why an in-home hospice team will be able to provide your loved one with all the palliative care they need and your doctor will let you know what to seek out, from clinical oncology to emotional support through hospice care. If your loved one needs palliative care, ask what you can expect before you go with one hospice care team to take care of your loved one through their transition.
Don’t Wait Until It’s Too Late
The worst thing that you can do for your loved one is to wait until it’s too late to seek out in-home hospice care that tends to their physical, emotional, social, and spiritual needs as they pass on to the next stage of their life and you don’t want to questions your actions for the rest of your life. Find a hospice care team that can offer your loved one the support they need and administer it in a caring way that most people can only get from their family members. It’s the best thing you could ever do for them and it doesn’t take much to make it happen.
Find a hospice care team that can check all the boxes and provide the best kind of support that you can find from caring and compassionate professionals who, not only know what a person needs at the end of life but want to provide it as best they can in a familiar and comforting environment. It will give you the peace of mind that you’re missing right now and you can’t replace that with anything else in the world. Remember that it’s not just about what you can do for your loved one, but also what your care team can do for you and the rest of your family while you all go through this change together.