About Hospice
Hospice is a patient-centered approach to improve the quality of life and provide compassionate support for patients and families. Hospice care is focused on maintaining dignity and providing comfort, including pain and symptom management at the end of life. Hospice is for patients with a variety of diagnoses, including heart disease, stroke, liver disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and more. This family and patient centered care is provided for the patient and family 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This type of care, called palliative care, involves the aggressive treatment of physical and emotional pain and symptoms. Hospice affirms life, improves comfort, and does not hasten or postpone death.
How Can Hospice Help
General Information
Below are the types of services provided by Hopestone Hospice.
Hospice can be provided in any setting—home, nursing home, assisted living facility, or inpatient hospital. Hospice provides comprehensive comfort care as well as support for the family. It is provided by clinicians with special skills—among them nurses, doctors, social workers, spiritual advisors, and trained volunteers. Everyone works together with the person who is dying, the caregiver, and/or the family to provide the medical, emotional, and spiritual support needed.
It is important to remember that stopping treatment aimed at curing an illness does not mean discontinuing all treatment.
Families of people who received care through a hospice program are more satisfied with end-of-life care than are those of people who did not have hospice services. Also, hospice recipients are more likely to have their pain controlled and less likely to undergo tests or be given medicines they don't need, compared with people who do not use hospice services.
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Routine Care
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Physicians and Nurses On Call 24/7
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Social Workers
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Certified Nurses Aides
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Chaplains
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Speech, Physical, and Occupational Therapists
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Dietitians
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Volunteers
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Bereavement Support for Family & Friends
Continuous Care
Professional care provided at the bedside during brief periods of crisis for pain control and acute symptom management.
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Inpatient Hospice Care
Twenty-four hour care for symptom management or during one's final days in a facility.
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Continuous Care
Continuous Care for terminally ill patients is one of four types of hospice care covered by the Medicare Hospice Benefit. This round-the-clock level of care is provided in the home for brief periods of time when the patient is experiencing a crisis. It is designed to honor a patient’s wish to remain at home by providing the care needed to control the patient’s symptoms and alleviate the crisis.
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Bereavement
The Bereavement Aftercare process encompasses care and support provided by close family members and friends as well as the family's religious affiliations and hospice chaplains. At Huntsville Memorial Hospice, our Chaplains seek to sensitively supplement the care given by the patients individual support system, and to be available to a greater degree to families when this support system is not in place.
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Bereavement Aftercare is provided up to and in some cases beyond thirteen months for families that have lost loved ones.
Our services are provided by an experienced and compassionate Chaplain committed to the spiritual and emotional well being of our patients and their loved ones during the most stressful time of their lives.
The following are Bereavement Services available through Hopestone Hospice:
• Personal visits for the purpose of encouragement, prayer and grief counseling
• Funeral and Memorial Services planned and conducted at the families request
• Cards and letters of condolence, comfort, support and feedback on an ongoing basis
• Phone calls to check up on family's spiritual and emotional well being
• Monthly encouragement cards
• Referral to Community Grief Recovery Support Groups as needed/requested
