When Respite Care Becomes Part Of Your Hospice Arrangement
Hospice care is defined generally as in home care to a terminally ill patient whose disease has progressed to such an extent that it is likely to have her or him succumb to its ravages within six months or less. The goal of hospice care is to permit the patient to die in the comforts of home, surrounded by loved ones, and away from the often times impersonal and constantly changing environs of the traditional hospital setting. Hospice care is a program that involves a team of professionals who not only see to the patient’s medical needs but also to the emotional wellbeing as well as any pain management issues.
When respite care becomes part of your hospice arrangements, you have probably already noticed that there is a lot more to this arrangement than even the most consideration definitions and generally speaking, a big chunk of care is still provided by loved ones and kinship caregivers. In the same vein, this is often the time that the family must come to terms with the fact that you will leave them soon and for some this is a harder pill to swallow than they might have initially assumed.
To this end respite care provides the opportunity for your kinship caregiver to get some alone time to just recharge and deal with something other than death, dying, and the sadness associated with the thought. In addition, since your caregiver most likely also has a family to look after, it only makes sense to enlist the help of a trained respite caregiver to take over for a while so she or he may devote the time needed to the care of the family. This kind of respite care is usually paid for my Medicare and administered in an actual hospice facility.
Transportation may be arranged with one of the contracted patient transporting agencies or you may enlist the help of your loved one to be taken to the hospice home. It is a little known fact that respite care in a hospice is covered by Medicare at 95% for up to five days at a time. After these five days you need to leave the hospice and your caregiver needs to once again take over being the primary care facilitator for you in your home. It is interesting to note that number of times that you may give your caregiver a break by checking into the hospice facility is unlimited.
When respite care becomes part of your hospice arrangements, your loved ones will usually breathe a bit easier. This is not at all a reflection of their unwillingness to care for you but instead it is simply a sign that they are as apprehensive as you may be about the turn your health has taken and how to cope with the implication of the diagnosis. Although terminal illness in context is often intellectually understood, dealing with it and actually embracing it as part of the natural process are two very different things indeed.
