National Hospice & Palliative Care Month
November is National Hospice and Palliative Care Month and hospice and palliative programs across the country are reaching out to raise awareness about hospice and palliative care. Hospice is not a place but is high-quality care that enables patients and families to focus on living as fully as possible despite a life-limiting illness. Palliative care brings this holistic model of care to people earlier in the course of a serious illness. “We are committed to serve and deliver high-quality person-centered care to anyone who is facing a life-limiting illness,” said Natalie Whitehurst, Executive Director, Hospice of the North County. “We are pleased to see many patients and their families experience more meaningful moments together.”
For more than forty years, hospice has helped provide comfort and dignity to millions of people, allowing them to spend their final months wherever they call home, surrounded by their loved ones. Hospices ensure that pain management, therapies, and treatments all support a plan of care that is centered on the person’s goals. Hospice care also provides emotional support and advice to help family members become confident caregivers and adjust to the future with grief support for up to a year.
Hospice is more than traditional health care. Hospice of the North Country provides pain management, symptom control, psychosocial support, and spiritual care to patients and their families when a cure is not possible. Hospice care is a combination of the highest level of quality medical care with the emotional and spiritual support that families need most when facing the end of life.
“It is essential that people understand that hospice and palliative care is not giving up, it is not the abandonment of care, and it is not reserved for the imminently dying,” said Edo Banach, president and CEO of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. “Hospice is a successful model of person-centered care that brings hope, dignity and compassion when they are most needed.”
The Hospice of the North Country team can provide care in a patient’s home, in hospitals, nursing homes, and assisted living facilities—wherever the patient calls home. Among its major responsibilities, hospice care includes the following:
§ managing the patient’s pain and symptoms
§ assists the patient with the emotional, psychosocial, and spiritual aspects of dying
§ provides needed prescriptions, medical supplies, and equipment related to hospice diagnosis
§ educate and supports family on how to care for their loved one
§ delivers special services like speech and physical therapy when needed
§ makes short-term inpatient care available when pain or symptoms become too difficult to treat at home, or the caregiver needs respite
§ provides bereavement care and counseling to surviving family and friends
§ offer volunteer assistance for patients and families
§ assists families with accessing community resources
In 2018, 1.61 million Medicare beneficiaries received care from hospices in this country, reports NHPCO. Hospice is unique in that it offers an interdisciplinary team approach to treatment. Caring for the whole person allows the team to address each patient’s unique needs and challenges.
For additional information about hospice and advance care planning, call Hospice of the North Country at 518.483.3200 (Malone office) or 518.561.8465 (Plattsburgh office). Or, you can visit hospicenc.org. The National Hospice and Palliative Care Organizations Caring Connections offers information and resources for professionals and consumers at caringinfo.org.
The term “hospice” (from the same linguistic root as “hospitality”) can be traced back to medieval times when it referred to a place of shelter and rest for weary or ill travelers on a long journey. The name was first applied to specialized care for dying patients by physician Dame Cicely Saunders, who began her work with the terminally ill in 1948 and eventually went on to create the first modern hospice—St. Christopher’s Hospice—in a residential suburb of London.
Saunders introduced the idea of specialized care for the dying to the United States during a 1963 visit with Yale University. Her lecture, given to medical students, nurses, social workers, and chaplains about the concept of holistic hospice care, included photos of terminally ill cancer patients and their families, showing the dramatic differences before and after the symptom control care.