What Is Hospice?

Hospice Care is a comprehensive family-centered program designed to provide hope, care, and comfort to individuals with a life-limiting illness.

For many people, hospice is a frightening word because it is associated with giving up hope and giving into death. In reality, hospice care provides the opportunity for reclaiming and maintaining quality of life, planning for and arranging end of life plans, and receiving emotional and spiritual support on the journey to acceptance, healing, and peace during the dying process.

While hope of remission and cure is never abandoned, the focus of hospice care is on creating an environment where pain and symptoms are expertly treated.

People choose hospice when they have a life limiting illness and no longer desire aggressive medical intervention or have been told by their medical provider they can no longer benefit from aggressive medical intervention. During the last stages of a serious illness, many people feel that they have lost control over their lives and over what will happen to them. Hospice care allows the individual and their family to make decisions about things that are important to them and helps family members manage the practical details and emotional challenges of caring for a loved one with a life limiting illness.

Having a dedicated, compassionate, and skilled team of professionals available to assess and address the pain and discomfort associated with disease progression can help make a difference in everyone’s well-being. Hospice helps families deal with the range of emotions that surround this difficult time, offering guidance from social workers and chaplains.

When the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual pain is addressed, patients and loved ones can spend the precious time remaining concentrating on things that are important to them. In addition, hospice will also offer the family bereavement and grief counseling after their loved one has passed and help with some of the after-death tasks that need to be completed.