What To Expect During The First Week Of Home Hospice Care: A Family Guide
If you’re unsure of what to expect on the first week of your home hospice care, you don’t have to feel alone because no family members ever really know what’s going on and sometimes it can be difficult to find the emotional support you need for your own personal care. If you opt for hospice care at home when you can expect to have a hospice care team that assists family caregivers as your family member reaches his or her end of life. What separates it from an inpatient facility is that treatment options are administered in the patient’s home where they’re most comfortable and surrounded by loved ones.
Both the patient and family members will receive emotional and spiritual support while hospice nurses bring in the medical equipment and medical supplies they need to support patients and ensure their quality of life as they reach the end of their life expectancy. Home hospice care is almost always preferred over an assisted living facility when a loved one needs end-of-life care or is suffering from a serious illness and all medical options have been exhausted. The patient and other family members will receive support services at home and your hospice team will help you make sure your loved one’s insurance plan and insurance benefits cover all the costs they’re supposed to cover.
Choosing the Best Home Hospice Care for Your Loved One
When you’re looking at hospice care services, it’s important to understand what separates it from palliative care when your loved one has a life-limiting illness and curative treatment has nothing left to offer them, whether they’re in an inpatient care facility or already home. A palliative care organization is there to offer pain management while the health care professionals provide drugs and other means to make them comfortable, and not much else. This care isn’t specifically for the terminally ill, it’s more centered on managing symptoms and medical care.
The main difference between hospice and palliative care is that hospice programs offer pain relief and symptom relief for hospice patients who have reached their end of life and need spiritual care as well as medical care to ensure their quality of life. They’re also there to answer questions from the family and help with everything from meal preparation to making phone calls to veterans affairs, private insurance companies, and home medicare providers to ensure your loved one is getting the insurance coverage to which they’re entitled. Hospice and palliative care are similar in some ways, but it’s important to understand that hospice care focuses on terminal illness, end-of-life care, and personal care while palliative care only focuses on pain relief.
Understanding Hospice Care
Your hospice care team is there to assist with much more than symptom management and most Medicaid insurance plans will cover it, so it’s important to consider it as one of your best options when nursing homes can’t offer your loved one the comfort and quality of life they want. While other caregivers have an advance directive to manage pain and other symptoms, just like your loved one would get in an emergency room, hospice benefits will come with much more care planning. Just some hospice benefits include a hospice nurse, a hospice doctor, and emotional support that wouldn’t be available in a nursing home.
Your hospice program will come with respite care that you and other family members can take advantage of when you need a break from caring for a loved one with a terminal illness. Hospice services include food preparation, the administering of medication, and the management of pain and other symptoms. You’ll also be assigned a social worker who will do all the work of getting your medical care bills covered by insurance, whether it’s private insurance coverage or Medicare, which is one more hospice benefit you and your family can take full advantage of.
Benefits of Hospice Care
If your loved one’s healthcare provider thinks hospice programs are the best path forward, you can expect to get many benefits, especially when you opt for hospice care at home instead of a nursing home that won’t make them as comfortable as they can be. Your hospice team will tend to your loved one as they reach their end of life and a level of personal care that you won’t be able to find anywhere else. Hospice services are available for all family members and you’ll have access to a hospice aide who can offer respite care as well as a social worker to deal with the finances while you focus on your loved one.
Hospice care at home includes meal preparation, emotional support, spiritual support, and care for any serious illness your loved one is suffering from that needs medical care. If your loved one has made a written statement choosing hospice care, you can get your hospice team right away so family caregivers aren’t overwhelmed with the personal care it takes to ensure a person’s comfort at their end of life. Hospice care at home is always the best option, no matter what your loved one’s life expectancy happens to be and your hospice team will always keep them as comfortable as possible while your family gets the emotional care they need.
The Hospice Team
The first week of hospice care will introduce you to the entire hospice team so you know what you expect as the care carries on at home, instead of an inpatient facility. Your team will include one or more hospice nurses, a hospice doctor to prescribe any drugs that are needed, volunteers to cook meals and clean, and a social worker to take care of the finances for you. The first week will also be when medical equipment and medical supplies needed for hospice care are brought to the home so they’re always available.
Any advance care planning will also be set up so your hospice care team has what they need to treat the symptoms of any terminal illness or serious illness. While this week will have a lot going on to get the home ready, your loved one will be kept comfortable and there will be someone to answer questions as they come up for the hospice patient and the family. Bereavement counselors will also be available for the entire family to talk to whenever they need support that isn’t offered by other forms of medical care.
Choosing a Hospice Provider
When it comes time to choose hospice services, it’s important to find a home hospice provider that offers all the care your loved one needs, as well as care for the family that’s going through the same thing at the same time as persons reaching their end of life. The right hospice care provider will have a full staff available to the family and offer everything that’s needed from equipment to drugs and supplies that your loved one will need. This hospice care should be provided at home to keep your loved one comfortable and in familiar settings while saving them from emergency room visits if they have a serious illness.
It should be easy to find your hospice care provider online so you can see what other people have said about them, as well as the care they offered their loved ones and the respite care they offered to the family as the process carried out. It’s also a good idea to go with a provider that offers other forms of care so you can be sure they know everything they can about the medical needs that someone in hospice may require from them. Their support services should be laid out for you so you can decide on the right provider as soon as home treatment options are discussed.
Talking to Your Family About Hospice Care
No matter what kind of insurance coverage you have, your care planning for your loved one should include talking to your family about hospice care before it becomes too late to keep them comfortable and at home as they reach their end of life. Their quality of life will be best when they receive hospice care at home and it’s important to discuss it with the entire family when it becomes clear that all other options have been exhausted. Hospice care is best when it’s taken on early and should be part of your care planning when pain management and symptom relief become the best ways of caring for your loved one.
Don’t waste time taking on hospice care at home until meal preparation and family care become too much for your family to manage and your loved one’s quality of life begins to suffer as a result of so much care being needed. Your hospice team will provide the spiritual care your loved one needs as well as medical needs and you’ll get a social worker to take care of the financial details so you can spend your time with your loved one. There’s a hospice team ready to help and it will benefit everyone in the family, so talk about it as soon as you can.