Does Hospice Provide 24-Hour Care?

In the life of many people, there are such cases when it is time to take care of an elderly or hopelessly ill person. Such people need home care 24 7 as they cannot be responsible for themselves.

In such situations, relatives have three main options – to leave a sick person in the hospital and pay for each day of his stay there, for which you will have to spend a lot of money. The second way out is to identify the patient in a hospice, where he will be provided with round-the-clock care, but without close people and relatives, such as husbands, wives, or children.

The third and most humane option is to organize a hospice at home, under the supervision of professionals and relatives both at the same time, which will provide a person with the most comfortable conditions in the last days of life.

What is Home Hospice?

Hospice at home is a set of palliative care services provided by professional doctors and nurses, in which the patient is at home and provided with the most comfortable conditions. Unlike hospitals, such hospices usually involve the presence of relatives and close people in the final stage of a patient’s life.

To organize a hospice at home, it is required to arrange a bed for a patient, install the necessary equipment to maintain a high quality of life for the patient, as well as provide the necessary therapy throughout the rest of a person’s life.

In the United States, home hospices are welcome on the order of the attending physician, provided that his requirements are met. Our All American Home Care Company provides medical professionals and nurses to care for slaughterhouse patients in a home hospice setting.

When is it recommended to transfer a patient to a hospice?

Hospice is a necessary condition for the maintenance of a hopeless patient who can no longer be helped by standard treatment. Such people, as a rule, live out their last days or months, depending on the severity of the pathologies and the doctors’ prognosis.

Doctors can only support the patient’s comfortable existence without prospects for recovery and slightly extend his life expectancy. Hospice is assigned to the following categories of hospital patients or people with certain types of diseases and pathologies:

• Older people with dementia above the second degree cannot take care of themselves. Help is needed for such people even in those cases when they declare that they cannot lead an independent lifestyle.
• Children with severe autism spectrum disorders, as well as patients with Down syndrome are unable to adapt normally to living in society.
• Disabled people of groups I or II, in case of loss of their basic functions or sensory. These people include limbless patients, paralyzed patients with spinal or central nervous system injuries, and blind or deaf patients.
• People who are diagnosed with end-stage cancer, when chemotherapy or surgery can no longer save them.
• People who are in a state of acute mental disorder cannot be in society without the presence of tutors.

Our company has a team of highly qualified specialists who provide both physical, medical, and psychological assistance to patients. All our nurses and medical attending staff have diplomas of higher education, and provide palliative care to all patients, regardless of diagnosis and age.

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Does Hospice Provide 24-Hour Care?

The answer to this question always is on the surface. Any hospice almost always implies care only for very sick people. Such patients are already too weak to take care of themselves at all.

Some of them can still dress, wash and go to the toilet on their own, but there are already irreversible violations in the brain, because of which the responsibility for people lies on the shoulders of official guardians or services for the care of the elderly.

All patients in the hospice require 24-Hour Care as there is a need for ongoing health monitoring, with tracking of test results, examinations, and analyses.

Our company is always ready to provide shift work for our nurses who will feed, dress, wash and perform other daily work for each incapacitated patient.

What is included in hospice services?

The services of any palliative care for patients, regardless of whether they are in a hospital or at home, include the following set of mandatory services that are aimed at improving the quality of human life:

• Providing the patient with everything necessary to maintain a normal life cycle. This includes sanitary and hygienic services, such as changing clothes, linen, toileting, and washing a person. Also, each such patient needs a normal balanced, or intravenous diet.
• Turning a bedridden patient on a bed eliminates or reduces the risk of bedsores. To avoid the development of damage to the skin and soft tissues, such a procedure should be carried out at least 2 times a day.
• If there is approval from the attending physician, the patient should go for a walk in the fresh air in a wheelchair, or independently, under the supervision of a nurse.
• Round-the-clock health monitoring, pressure measurement, heart rate control, as well as the performance of other organs in the body.
• Timely involvement of attending physicians to provide resuscitation in the event of a sharp deterioration in the patient’s health, or during seizures.
• Referral of the patient to the hospital for examinations or surgery, if there is a suspicion of progression of the disease.
• One of the most important stages of caring for a seriously ill person is providing him with psychological assistance and setting him up only for positive thoughts, which greatly alleviates his suffering.
• Consulting with relatives, insisting on their frequent presence next to the patient, as this helps him feel better and gives hope for recovery.

Our All American Home Care center employs specialized doctors and nurses who have vast experience in interacting with this category of patients, which allows us to apply exactly the necessary measures to maintain their mental and physical condition, to ensure the most comfortable life.

Requirements for hospice staff

Hospice staff is always subjected to the most severe physical and psychological pressure, and the requirements for them are very different from ordinary professionals who can work with people who show promise for recovery:

• A reserve of vitality and energy, since the work of 24-Hour Care requires maximum concentration of attention with little or no rest.
• Excellent health and absence of infections, because sick people are usually weakened by their diseases, which significantly affect the immune system, and even a small infection can play a fatal role.
• The presence of a diploma of medical education for a preliminary diagnosis.
• Experience in working with similar patients for intensive care, injections, as well as for other important procedures to improve the health of the patient.
• Experience in first aid and resuscitation in an emergency.
• Having teaching experience, or work experience as a psychologist, since the patient may be in a state of depression, requires the correct timbre of voice, intonation, and content of speech to quickly calm him down.
• The physical strength of the nurse is because it may be necessary to lift the patient to transfer him to a wheelchair or transfer to another bed.
• One of the main criteria is stress tolerance because the patient can often disobey instructions, refuse to take food or medicine, and also behave capriciously, which requires maximum restraint from the nurse.
• Another important factor, every hospice employee should always be ready for the patient to die at any second, which requires great mental fortitude.

We usually choose our medical staff by organizing complex competitions, based on which no more than 10% of candidates are selected. We can vouch for the qualifications and personal qualities, and humane treatment of patients suffering from a serious illness each of our specialists, which sets us apart from most competitors in the field of palliative care.

Many relatives of terminally ill people are often skeptical about home hospices due to the high cost of services. We can say that the All American Home Care service is one of the most affordable among other similar hospices. Our services cost no more than 30% of a standard bed-day in a regular municipal hospital, and dozens of insurance companies cooperate with us.

The second reason why you need to turn to us is that when caring for a patient, he may not obey the instructions and demands of relatives or close friends. This rarely happens when strangers take care of him, and given the great psychological experience of our staff, we can always find a common language with your ward. When you contact us, you can be sure of our 24/7 healthcare service and save both time and money.

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