Hospice volunteers
Besides trained nurses and social workers, Hospice trains volunteers who help provide respite for family care providers.Gail Lary, RN
Pemi-Baker Home Health & Hospice
Plymouth, NH
View the Video
LARY
The volunteer is someone that goes through a training program; and it's an extensive training program - it's about ten weeks. And, they learn various aspects of hospice, mostly emotional aspects, they learn about the dying process.
There's many other things - we could probably talk about that for an hour. But, the volunteer,
The role of the volunteer is to go into a person's home and actually stay with that person while the primary caregiver either takes a nap, does shopping, goes for a walk, or goes into their bedroom and closes the door--whatever it is that they need to do in order to get a little bit of respite from what is going on in their life. And, the volunteer goes in and does not do any personal care; that person does not go in and give a bath or that type of thing. But, the person will go in and read to the Hospice patient, watch television with them, talk with them, make them a meal, do things that are giving of themselves to the patient.