Understanding Comfort Care
Before death and funerals at funeral homes in Tallahassee, FL, often end-of-life care is required. This is known as comfort care. Comfort care is fully covered by Medicare and may be fully or partially covered by other types of health insurance. If you don’t have Medicare, check with your insurance provided to see what kind of comfort care coverage your policy offers.
Palliative care is one kind of comfort care. Palliative care is provided in the home to people who have chronic and severe illnesses and medical conditions that are being treated, but that require continual medical supervision and support. You can receive palliative care indefinitely or until you decide you no longer want treatment for your illness or medical condition.
Palliative care is an excellent option for people with severe medical conditions like congestive heart failure, cancer, or late-stage dementia where getting to medical facilities for checkups and other assistive therapies is prohibitive.
Palliative care generally includes one visit by a nurse each week to check on the medical condition of the patient. The nurse will take vital signs, do medical assessments based on the input of the patient and/or caregiver, draw bloodwork, if needed, and communicate medication recommendations to the patient’s primary care physician. The nurse can also request the primary care physician to do orders for medical equipment like hospital beds, walkers, and oxygen concentrators (these are safer and easier to use than oxygen tanks) to be delivered to the home.
Palliative care also includes the services of occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech therapists, and aides. If a patient has had a stroke, for example, each type of therapist can help adapt the home and improve the patient’s ability to move and talk. Therapists may come to the home once or twice a week. Aides are available, usually twice a week, to help with the personal grooming needs the patient has.
Palliative care is comprehensive care that is provided in the home as long as illnesses or medical conditions are being actively treated.
Once a patient decides they no longer want to have their chronic and severe illness or medical condition treated, then comfort care is provided in the form of hospice care. It’s important to understand that there comes a time in every severe illness or medical condition where treatments become ineffective or they take so much out of the person that the quality of life is greatly diminished. This is not giving up. Instead, it’s an acceptance of the reality of approaching death.
Hospice care admission is based on a single severe illness or medical condition. For example, if a person has terminal cancer and decides they no want treatment for it, then they will be admitted to hospice care for cancer. The hospice care admission is done by a nurse who visits the home. The nurse will ensure that medications for the illness the patient is admitted under are delivered to the home and that medical equipment needed is ordered and delivered. The nurse will also make sure that a comfort care kit (which is used during the dying process) is delivered to the home within 24 hours of admission to hospice care.
Other people who may visit the home during hospice care are chaplains, social workers, and aides.
In general, hospice care is on-call medical care, where hospice care is called in when the medical condition of the patient changes or worsens. Hospice care nurses will visit frequently during the last couple of days before the patient dies. They will be the first phone call the caregiver and/or family makes after death occurs.
If you want to know more about visitations at funeral homes in Tallahassee, FL, our compassionate and experienced staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations can help. You can come by our funeral home at 20 S. Duval St., Quincy, FL 32351, or you can contact us today at (850) 627-1111.
