Hospice care is used when a disease, such as advanced cancer, gets to the point when treatment can no longer cure or control it. In general, hospice care should be used when a person is expected to live about 6 months or less if the illness runs its usual course.

The benefits of hospice care, from increased comfort therapies, to services such as Crossroads’ Gift of a Day, can help the patient for as long as six months. If you or your loved one is terminal, there is no reason not to start making life better right now.

This can be in a house, a long-term care facility, assisted living or retirement community, rest homes, or hospitals. Depending on each patient’s needs, the hospice team can visit anywhere from once per day to a couple times a month.

No. Most hospice patients who reside in an assisted living or skilled nursing facility have third-party insurance (Medicaid or private insurance) or they pay out of pocket for their custodial care in the facility.

What does hospice provide? These hospice services include: Nursing visits to address physical symptoms. Visits from the hospice aide to provide personal care including bathing and grooming.

Hospice may also provide home nursing for hours at a time, and even overnight. This is one way that hospice providers attend to patient needs when intermittent care is not enough. Also, if a patient is actively dying and the family needs support, a hospice nurse may stay overnight.

Most patients are initially seen by a nurse two to three times per week, but visits may become more or less frequent based on the needs of the patient and family. Visits are approximately 60 minutes long.

Here are end-of-life signs and helpful tips:

• Coolness. Hands, arms, feet, and legs may be increasingly cool to the touch.
• Confusion. The patient may not know time or place and may not be able to identify people around them.
• Sleeping.
• Incontinence.
• Restlessness.
• Congestion.
• Urine decrease.
• Fluid and food decrease.