What is Hospice?
Your Choice in hospice.
Choosing a hospice provider can quickly become overwhelming. Hospitals often attempt to funnel patients into their hospice providers without informing you that you do indeed HAVE A CHOICE. Monarch Hospice wants you to know that you deserve to be educated, and you deserve quality service personalized for your circumstances.
Monarch is concerned foremost with the comfort and dignity of its patients. This drives our passion and focus for hiring devoted staff who will truly cares about the patient and deliver personalized, non-rushed patient care and family support.
choose
Definition of choose
1: to select freely and after consideration
choice
Definition of choice
noun
1: the act of choosing
2: power of choosing
3: care in selecting
Choose and choice. These words are often missing or glossed over in medical conversations with people facing life limiting illnesses. Often leaving a person not knowing they have options about their healthcare and following the lead of the health care provider talking to them. But every person has options and by knowing what questions to ask they can uncover them.
When facing a life limiting or terminal medical diagnosis it can be overwhelming to even know what questions to ask or to see that you have choices. There are choices to make about possible treatments or no treatments, advanced care planning/living wills, curative or hospice/comfort focused care, and health care providers.
Treatment vs no treatment or deciding to stop treatments is a difficult conversation to have with physicians and loved ones. One can also view this as quality vs quantity (time). It is a very personal decision to know if the length of time and days is more important than how you physically feel and what you can physically do during that time. Many individuals view their quality of life as more important than the number of days they have left. They want to feel the best they can for the time they have left so they can spend meaningful time focusing on their loved ones instead of being consumed with debilitating symptoms or side effects of treatments or going to numerous medical appointments and hospital stays.
Hospice may be the answer for those who have decided quality is their priority. Hospice care focusses on treating and minimizing symptoms with the goal of helping people experiencing what is important to them with the days they have left to live.
When do you need hospice?
Hospice should be called any time a patient is diagnosed with a life limiting illness. It is appropriate to be informed of all options for the patient, including hospice, whether or not hospice will be used immediately or at a later date.
If you are looking to determine if you or a loved one is ready for hospice you can fill out the form linked below.
The Grief Process
Monarch knows that death involves more than just the one who passes. Loved ones will go through many changes and stages themselves as well, which is why we created a 13 month bereavment program to assist loved ones through the 5 stages of grief. We provide customized counseling care from both a social worker and chaplain to help patients and families through the process. Our bereavment program provides mailings on grief education, phone calls, visits and also refers to appropriate support groups or individual counselors as needed.
Continued Education
Monarch is dedicated to learning industry best practice tactics and educating our clients and teams on how to care more passionately through those tactics. All of our aides are certified in personal care. All staff performs monthly educational in-services pertinent to hospice care. Certified Nursing Aides receive an extra monthly in-services over and above what the other staff does. Monarch Hospice also assists with training our facility staff on hospice and caring for our hospice patients.