Who will be with us?

Ask how often the nurse visits, who answers the phone at 2 am, and whether care comes to wherever home is.

Hospice care happens mostly in ordinary rooms: a kitchen, a bedroom, a recliner by the window. The question is who shows up in those rooms, and how often.

Every hospice has a team on paper. A nurse, an aide, a social worker, a chaplain, volunteers, a physician overseeing the plan of care. The differences are in practice. How many days a week will a nurse be here? Will the same people come, so we don’t start over every visit? Who answers when something goes wrong at 2 a.m., and how quickly can someone be at the door? Does care come to us wherever we are, or do we have to move to get it?

Those are fair questions, and a good provider will answer them plainly.

At Ohio’s Hospice, care comes to wherever home is: a house, an apartment, a nursing home, an assisted living community, or one of our inpatient care centers when symptoms need more than home can provide. The team includes nurses, aides, social workers, chaplains, physicians, and trained volunteers. The phone is answered around the clock by someone who can act on what you tell them, and medical equipment is delivered to the home.

For the person doing the caregiving, the daughter keeping the schedule or the husband counting the pills, that team is the difference between managing alone and being carried. You don’t have to do this alone.