Quote:
Originally Posted by PugMom
you touched on 1 of the things about hospice i'm not comfortable with: the lack of care when an issue should arise. if you have a heart attack, etc., no care is given. they hold your hand while you die, ...please tell me i'm wrong
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Not quite true. Hospice care is available when your condition is terminal: available when you and your doctor (and family, hopefully) decide that you are most likely going to die within a short time regardless of care and treatment, and that there is virtually no hope of you being able to regain a reasonable quality of life regardless of treatment.
Hospice care is comfort care, not restorative: it is end-of-life care and they do much more than "hold your hand". Hospice workers administer drugs designed to keep you comfortable, provide personal care (assisting with toileting, grooming, feeding, etc. as needed), act as a laiason between the patient and doctor, interact with family, and generally assist in just about all aspects of the dying process. Medicare - funded hospice is, as I recall, is available when the physician decides that the patient will die within six months, but no worries: if you make it to the six-month point alive, they just give you another six months. Anything beyond that I don't know: I had only one client exceed the six-month point and he died within a couple of weeks of renewal.
As with any other service, there are good providers and bad providers; it behooves the patient and their family to do their research ahead of time. Doctors do recommend agencies but in the cases I've been associated with those recommendations are generally for services affiliated with the hospital/clinic that they are affiliated with. There are most likely differences that vary state-to-state (words associated with the service may have slightly different meanings depending on the governing rules in effect, possibly a slight variation in services available, etc.), but this is generally the way that Hospice works.
All in all, not a bad way to cross the bridge.