Hospice Care Information For Families
At Elmwood Hills Healthcare and Rehabilitation, we offer Hospice Care as well as Palliative Care and we are often asked to distinguish between the two.
While there is certainly a great deal of overlap between these two specialty care areas, they are not entirely the same.
For today’s blog, we’ll focus on Hospice Care:
Hospice Care is the model of high-quality, compassionate care that helps patients and families live as fully as possible.
- The Medicare Hospice Benefit requires that a terminally-ill patient have a prognosis of six months or less: There is not a six-month limit to hospice care services.
- Hospice eligibility requirements should not be confused with length of service.
- A patient in the final phase of life may receive hospice care for as long as necessary when a physician certifies that he or she continues to meet eligibility requirements.
- Under the Medicare Hospice Benefit, two 90-day periods of care (a total of six months) are followed by an unlimited number of 60-day periods.
Hospice Care typically focuses on alleviating pain and staying away from all invasive procedures which would prolong life.
It is a holistic approach to end of life care, with a special emphasis on emotional support and empathy for both the family and the resident.
Our friends at Wellness.com recently published a poignant article on this topic, which can be read over here.
