Different medications may be given for symptom relief, and often, different methods of giving the medications may be used as the patient's condition changes. 1 Hospice services are to be tailored to meet your needs, within the confines of the rules governing hospice care. The benefits of hospice include the staff, medications and equipment needed to meet the needs you have in treating the terminal illness, and the hospice you use must make its services available to you on a 24 hour basis. The Interdisciplinary Team is comprised of your Attending Physician, the Medical Director of the hospice, the registered nurse, a social worker, chaplain, and other health care professionals. In addition to visits by these hospice staff, LPN's and home health aides may visit as needed to assist you at home.
Hospice care is available on a twenty-four hour basis.
This means that if there is any emergency or question that arises, a Registered Nurse is on-call to answer questions, come to your home to assess the patient and contact the physician for orders for needed medications, if necessary. In addition, if symptoms do become uncontrolled in a crisis situation, nurses will be sent out to stay with the patient and family, in your own home, in order to get symptoms under control. For this reason, it is extremely important that your physician be knowledgeable about caring for the terminally ill and that he or she agrees with the standards of care for hospice. This means that the physician subscribes to the accepted standard methods for controlling symptoms which may arise in the course of a terminal illness. If your symptoms are well-controlled, there is no problem.