What is hospice care?
When you have a serious, progressive illness, Capital Hospice offers compassionate, comprehensive, expert care that helps you to live each day to the fullest, with dignity and in comfort. Hospice assists people and their families with a full range of medical, emotional, spiritual, and social needs. Hospice regards death as part of the continuum of life. Hospice care neither prolongs life nor hastens death. We provide personalized services and a caring community so that you and your family can make end of life a time that meets your individual needs. We enhance the quality of end-of-life care, while providing an opportunity for patients and their families to strengthen their relationships.
The term “Hospice” comes from the same root word as “hospitality” and can be traced back to early Western Civilization when it was used to describe a place of shelter and rest for weary or sick travelers on long journeys. The term was first applied to specialized care for dying patients in 1967, at St. Christopher¹s Hospice in a residential suburb of London. Today, the term “Hospice” refers to a steadily growing concept of humane and compassionate care which is implemented in a variety of settings in patients¹ homes, hospitals, nursing homes, long-term care facilities or free-standing in-patient hospice facilities. The philosophy of hospice care is to provide support and care in the last phases of incurable disease so that people may live as fully and as comfortably as possible. Hospice care seeks to enable patients to carry on an alert, pain-free life and to manage other symptoms so that their last days may be spent with dignity and quality at home or in a home-like setting. Hospice
Hospice care is provided to a patient and his or her family when treatment or a cure is no longer an option. Hospice care is provided with an interdisciplinary approach to comfort care that utilizes nursing, social work, grief and bereavement counseling, inter-faith ministry, home health aides and volunteer services. Hospice care is available when a patient has received a six month prognosis, as determined by the patient’s primary care physician.
Hospice care is a health service delivery program to help maintain quality of life when a person is faced with a life-limiting illness. Hospice care combines a team of professionals that focuses on an individual’s needs and goals and allows that person to approach the end of life with confidence in comfort, peace, and dignity. The primary goals of hospice care are comfort and quality of life. Hospice care focuses on the patient and the family’s individual needs, relieving pain and discomfort, and helping loved ones cope with the emotional, psychological, and spiritual impact of incurable illness, dying, and grief. It acknowledges the fact that every person is unique with their own set of personal beliefs, hopes, and fears. The overall purpose of hospice care is to promote the patient’s well-being as long as possible. Hospice care can provide expertise in comfort care including medications and therapies to relieve pain and symptoms, twenty-four hour support in the form of on-call servic
