There has been a great deal of interest in hospice and home care for the terminally ill. What are the advantages of each for patients and care providers? What are the disadvantages?
What will be an ideal response?
Hospice care is designed to provide palliative care and emotional support to dying patients and their family members. Patients are encouraged to personalize their living areas as much as possible by bringing in their own familiar things. Patients also typically wear their own clothes and determine their own activities. Hospice care is oriented toward improving a patient's social support system. Restrictions on visits from family or friends are removed as much as possible. Staff are especially trained to interact with patients in a warm, emotionally caring way. Home care appears to be the care of choice for most terminally ill patients, and for many patients, it may be the only economically feasible care. The psychological advantages of home care are that the patient is surrounded by personal items and by family rather than medical staff. Some degree of control can be maintained over such activities as what to eat or what to wear. Although home care is often easier on the patient psychologically, it can be very stressful for the family. Even if the family can afford around-the-clock nursing, often at least one family member's energies must be devoted to the patient on an almost full-time basis. The designated caregiver must often leave work and faces the additional stress of contact, that of constant contact with the prospect of death. The caregiver may be torn between wanting to keep the patient alive and wanting the patient's and their own suffering to end.
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