Hospice
What is Hospice and how does this program help people with cancer?Gail Lary, RN
Pemi-Baker Home Health & Hospice
Plymouth, NH
Related Links:
http://www.nhpco.org
http://www.hospicefoundation.org
LARY
The goal of Hospice, as I see it and I think my colleagues see it in this area, is to allow the patient to die at home in comfort and with dignity. And, that is the true goal of Hospice. The true goal - to extend that a little bit further - nobody has to die in pain.
There are many services that we provide under Hospice and all of these services are services that are paid for by either a third party or by Medicare. We provide skilled nursing, we provide skilled nursing visits of an RN; and sometimes we can provide them up to twice a day if they're going through a crisis. We provide physical therapy, occupational therapy. We provide a medical social worker to go in, we provide a chaplain or anyone that - they can actually use their own minister or we do have one on staff that we will provide--to go in and talk about bereavement or anything that they really need to talk about spiritually. And, we provide what used to be called home health aides; they're now called licensed nurses aides, LNA's. And, they will go in and do personal care for the patient.
What we'd like to see is a person to sign on to the hospice program early after they have been diagnosed. This is not a death sentence. It doesn't mean that because they signed onto hospice that they're going to die imminently or have to die imminently. It does mean that a doctor has to give a prognosis, a tentative prognosis, of six months or less for the person to live.
But, there have been many times when patients have outlived their prognosis three or four times over, and we've taken people off of hospice and back into regular health care or discharged them because they have gotten better.